Developers of the project yt-dlp, which continues the development of the youtube-dl toolkit for downloading sound and video from online services, announced that starting with today’s release yt-dlp 2025.11.12 for full download Content from YouTube requires installation of an external JavaScript engine. The use of the JavaScript engine is explained by the introduction of checks into YouTube, which require executing JavaScript code to pass.
Support for working with YouTube without JavaScript has been deprecated in yt-dlp. It is noted that some videos may continue to load without using the JavaScript engine, but the number of supported formats is limited and it is expected that the situation will worsen over time. Failures that occur when downloading content from YouTube without using JavaScript will now be considered by the yt-dlp developers not as errors, but as problems that cannot be fixed. In the future, it is expected that working with YouTube without JavaScript will become impossible.
The supported JavaScript runtimes are Deno (recommended), Node.js, QuickJS, QuickJS-ng and Bun. In addition, to work with JavaScript runtime in yt-dlp, you need to install the yt-dlp-ejs component, which is included in official builds.
Among the changes not related to YouTube the new version highlights the addition of new content extractors for the services 1tv.ru/live, classics.nascar.com, mux.com and ardaudiothek