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Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by amiga386 on Thursday November 05, 2026 @12:08PM (#50381599)
It used to be but not now. Your browser is served little slices of the video and audio, and the player adapts in realtime, giving you lower or higher bitrate, depending on your network congestion.

yt-dlp, as far as I know, always asks for the same consistent quality/bitrate of your choosing (and saves them to disk and joins the segments and muxes the video and audio into one stream)

Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by asdff on Thursday November 05, 2026 @02:41PM (#50383458)
Bitrate is irrelevant. It’s a download either way. Serving little slices is downloading.
Re:Download your favourite YouTube videos by amiga386 on Friday November 06, 2026 @05:48AM (#50390734)
My point it that it's not the same slices firstly, and secondly the muxing of the slices and streams is an extra operation that the browser cannot do.