If you mean youtube-dl then you might be better of migrating to yt-dlp. It doesn't look like youtube-dl is going to resolve those throttling issues any time soon.

Nope, Google is actively targeting different tools, yt-dlp included.

It's a game of whack-a-mole right now.

Yes, if you don't provide a correct token that is calculated in heavily obfuscated javascript, the CDN will throttle you to kilobyte/s levels, basically making it impossible to watch anything real-time.

The common way to deal with this seems to be to "emulate" the function calls on the input data, which seem to be randomized.

Yes, I have a browser plugin to open youtube links in mpv, but it's been unusable recently with constant buffering. I dont even fetch them at best quality.

Even the official client has been buffering heavily on iOS for the last two days. No idea what's going on, but I'm getting RealPlayer flashbacks.

Oh goodie, I am not the only one. I ran into this issue last night and YouTube app in my iPad is buffering heavily and stuck in 480p. My usual solution for this is to restart the iPad. Yup, have to restart the iPad because swipe-to-close didn't help.

pip install yt-dlp

In ~/.config/mpv/mpv.conf, add the following line, preferably near the top:

script-opts-add=ytdl_hook-ytdl_path=yt-dlp

That should hopefully solve your issue.

You don't need to update the config if you have the latest version of mpv (0.34) released one month ago.

Are you using yt-dlp with mpv?