youtube-dl has been dead for many years now; it's a lot like XFree86, where the original project is a zombie with very few real users, but the original maintainers refuse to acknowledge reality and just shutter the thing, so newcomers get confused. Everyone's moved to yt-dlp now.

The author(s) got into legal trouble.

https://youtube-dl.org

> Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.

https://openjur.de/u/2466945.html

For providing a tool that lets people download YT videos? The same should apply to yt-dlp, but that project is hosted on github.com with no apparent problems. What's stopping the youtube-dl people from doing the same and just ignoring this silly court ruling?

The case is about downloading music or rather enabling others to do so ("Beihilfe"). GEMA really is quite terrible.

What's stopping them? Dunno, (the threat of) police showing up at the door? Shitty pop songs are not worth going to prison for.

Apparently this isn't stopping the yt-dlp people.

Maybe they aren't German

I am using the GUI version on windows https://oleksis.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/

Yeah, yt-dlp is the successor. I've been using it for years.