Reino

Then why do you need mine? While I was at it (compiling OpenSSL) I've had a look at this, but I couldn't compile quickjs. The culprit is undoubtedly "Add cross-platform Atomics support". I think it will be extremely difficult to restore WinXP compatibility. Attempting this at all, I think a patch similar to how I (with the help of Gianluigi "sherpya" Tiesi) restored WinXP compatibility to libaom back in the day is needed. We could ask him to have a look?

I have no experience with Github workflow at all, but you can't set it up to utilize the latest Python and OpenSSL as well? I thought these are still WinXP compatible, are they not? Anyway... despite a small bump in the road I've compiled and uploaded OpenSSL 3.6.1.

But to be clear; if you value the fact that your custom builds are compiled with the latest OpenSSL, then you shouldn't use `-U`, I guess? I mean... C:\>yt-dlp_nicolaasjan.exe -v [...] [debug] Python 3.14.2 (CPython AMD64 64bit) - Windows-11-10.0.26200-SP0 (OpenSSL 3.6.1 27 Jan 2026) C:\>yt-dlp_nicolaasjan.exe -U [...] Updated yt-dlp to stable@2026.01.29 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp C:\>yt-dlp_nicolaasjan.exe -v [...] [debug] Python 3.10.11 (CPython AMD64 64bit) - Windows-10-10.0.26200-SP0 (OpenSSL 1.1.1t 7 Feb 2023) The initial 'yt-dlp_nicolaasjan.exe' is from yt-dlp-test.zip. And btw, it updates from "yt-dlp/yt-dlp" instead of "nicolaasjan/yt-dlp". Or am I missing something? I thought you managed to compile it yourself...

I know your custom (test-)builds in the past either had some extras or left out some specific upstream changes. Why then set up this Github workflow if there's no difference compared to upstream? I try to understand.

As I'm out of touch as far as WinXP is concerned... do none of the supported JS runtimes work on WinXP? It's obvious you manually create the test-builds with the latest Python and OpenSSL versions, but what about the Github releases? What exactly are the differences between these and the official yt-dlp builds?

For anyone not up to speed; the reason why this is happening has been revealed by one of yt-dlp's major contributors: A lot has changed recently, so I've done some new testing. ios For me personally this player_client still works without a Javascript runtime and a 403 HTTP Error. Compared to me previous post `;formats=missing_pot` is needed though: FOR /F "delims=" %A IN (' yt-dlp.exe --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=ios;formats=missing_pot" -f "(bv[width<=1920]+ba)[protocol^=m3u8]" -O urls "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=###########" ') DO @IF NOT DEFINED url[0] (SET url[0]=%A) ELSE (SET url[1]=%A) "C:\Program Files\MPC-HC\mpc-hc64.exe" "%url[0]%" /dub "%url[1]%" /close This oldschool method works fine, but as it requires two separate commands I always use my favorite command-line tool Xidel to create the following one-liner: FOR /F "delims=" %A IN ('yt-dlp.exe --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=ios;formats=missing_pot" -f "(bv[width<=1920]+ba)[protocol^=m3u8]" -O urls "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=###########" ^| xidel -se "let $url:=x:lines($raw) return `\"C:\\Program Files\\MPC-HC\\mpc-hc64.exe\" \"{$url[1]}\" /dub \"{$url[2]}\" /close`"') DO @%A FOR /F "delims=" %A IN (' yt-dlp.exe --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=ios;formats=missing_pot" -f "(bv[width<=1920]+ba)[protocol^=m3u8]" -O urls "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=###########" ^| xidel -se "let $url:=x:lines($raw) return `\"C:\\Program Files\\MPC-HC\\mpc-hc64.exe\" \"{$url[1]}\" /dub \"{$url[2]}\" /close`" ') DO @%A As an alternative to... -f "(bv[width<=1920]+ba)[protocol^=m3u8]" ...you could also use... -f "bv[width<=1920]+ba" -S "+proto" --format-sort-force web_safari This player_client does require a Javascript runtime (I'm using deno). It only provides the m3u8 protocol formats (audio and video combined), so no filtering is needed, which makes the one-liner very simple: FOR /F "delims=" %A IN (' yt-dlp.exe --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=web_safari" -f "[width<=1920]" -O urls "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=###########" ') DO @"C:\Program Files\MPC-HC\mpc-hc64.exe" "%A" /close I'm not sure if this player_client provides anything larger than 1080p. If it doesn't, then `-f "[width<=1920]"` isn't needed. As mentioned earlier, most of the time I now use LibreWolf to watch ad-free Youtube videos. I do remember getting the "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot." message after having watched a dozen Youtube videos through yt-dlp and MPC-HC. Maybe "--impersonate firefox" could prevent that from happening?

Seeing you've included my 'libcrypto-3.dll' and 'libssl-3.dll' within your 'Python311_XP-folder.7z', I guess that's my confirmation.

Thank you, @davidz. @VistaLover, you're right. If my old pc wouldn't have died, then I definitely would've continued compiling FFmpeg. But in the end I indeed don't regret it at all. I've gone from a single core AMD Athlon XP 3200+ to an 8 core (16 threads) AMD Ryzen AI Max 385 (Framework Desktop, see photos), with an integrated iGPU (Radeon 8050S) that is as powerful as an AMD Radeon RX 6600 XT. And let's not forget the NVME SSDs. The transition is enormous! Right now only the monitor I'm using is still my old Samsung SyncMaster 203B (1400x1050@60Hz), because I'm waiting for the ASUS ROG Strix OLED XG27AQWMG (2560x1440@280Hz) to become available. For the OS I took the chance and installed Windows X-Lite instead of the normal Win11 Pro iso. Despite all the negative comments on Win11 at the moment, I absolutely love it! Very fast, light and responsive. Never regretted it. My main internetbrowser is still Pale Moon (on WinXP it was New Moon obviously), but my absolute secondary one is LibreWolf. A lot of websites nowadays just don't work anymore with Pale Moon. I'm now typing this message also in LibreWolf. Also with the integrated uBlock Origin add-on I can watch Youtube videos uninterupted. Absolutely amazing!

What piece of software is that? I know Dependency Walker, but this is not it.

I've uploaded v3.6.0 (for which my AMD Ryzen AI MAX 385 for the first time did all the hard, and particularly quick, work). Please confirm it works on WinXP.

You spoke too soon. This is not an issue at all. As commented by xpalidotious, the video is mostly static, which means a low(er) bitrate would suffice for a targeted image quality.

It does. Thank you! I can confirm, the binary works on Win11 Pro (on my brand new Framework Desktop).

Confirmed. Thanks.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/14456#issuecomment-3339167951: --extractor-args "youtube:player-client=default,-tv_simply"

I'm sorry if you felt my post was directed to you. It wasn't. I'm not using your binaries either. I'm on Win11, so I'm using the original ones anyway. I won't be asking this from you. I was just explaning my preference for the m3u8 HLS streams, plus I was wondering if more people experienced the bandwidth "issues" with DASH streams and if maybe something could be done to it. Btw, I know very well what you're dealing with, because with FFmpeg for WinXP I dealt with maintaining quite a number of patches to keep it all WinXP and non-SSE2 compatible. That's great! Thanks for letting us know.

Maybe I should elaborate on this a bit, because the reason why I do is (surprisingly) hardly ever mentioned. I hate ads, so I try to watch Youtube videos as much as possible directly with MPC-HC. I think only 0,1% of the time I use yt-dlp for downloading. 99,9% of the time it's just for watching: FOR /F "delims=" %A IN (' yt-dlp_20082025.exe --extractor-args "youtube:player-client=ios" -f "bv[vcodec!^=av01][width<=1920]+ba" -S "+proto" -O urls "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxxxxx" ^| xidel -se "let $url:=x:lines($raw) return `\"C:\\Program Files\\Media\\MPC-HC\\mpc-hc64.exe\" \"{$url[1]}\" /dub \"{$url[2]}\" /close`" ') DO @%A This executes MPC-HC which opens two m3u8 HLS streams (VP9 1080p video and AAC audio). The reason why I prefer the iOS m3u8 HLS streams is because, unlike the DASH streams, they don't exhibit bandwidth "issues". What do I mean by "issues"? It's mostly prevalent with videos that have huge bandwidth fluctuations, like those from Hardware Unboxed for instance. The first halve of their videos often has a low bitrate, because of them talking with a static background. Then suddenly fast-paced gameplay footage kicks in, which sees the bitrate skyrocket. With the m3u8 HLS streams this is no issue, but when I open the DASH variants instead, it looks as though the entire video is played back with a static average bitrate. The first halve of such a video this is no problem, but the moment the fast-paced gameplay footage kicks in it starts to stutter massively, because Youtube doesn't provide/allow enough bandwidth to keep up. I take it I'm not the only one having experienced this?

I'm not that familiar with the compilation process of Python, but I don't think that's how it works. They are linked to the 'libcrypto*.a' and 'libssl*.a' files and therefore you can't just replace the dll-files and expect them to work. @cmalex has to recompile the whole thing, which he already did. I don't understand why 2 years ago and still today he wants to use the shared OpenSSL dev-files. I could be wrong, but I thought linking the static OpenSSL dev-files is much easier. I personally don't have a need for it. The only reason why I started compiling the shared OpenSSL dll-files is because Xidel needs them to open https-urls on WinXP. But since I'm now on a Win11 laptop that's not needed anymore either. I assume you do have a need for it? I've reuploaded 'openssl-3.5.2-win32-shared-dev-xpmod-sse.7z' and recompiled 'openssl-3.5.2-win32-static-dev-xpmod-sse.7z'. They now include a bin-dir with the 2 dll-files and 'openssl.exe' respectively. Can you test if the exe-file actually works on WinXP?

I hope openssl-3.1.0-win32-dev-xpmod-sse.7z would suffice. And FFmpeg: ffmpeg-6.1-588-4006c71-win32-dev-xpmod-sse.7z. @cmalex Believe it or not, only just now I suddenly realized why you needed that dev-archive. Have a look at https://rwijnsma.home.xs4all.nl/files/openssl/?C=M;O=A. I've just uploaded v3.5.2. Though I'm on Win11 nowadays, I believe it should work on WinXP.

Wow! Then in just 3 days they've pushed some pretty significant changes. One of which is "[ie/youtube] Replace ios with tv_simply in default clients (#14123)", which is a real pity, because I prefer the ios HLS formats. They've now flagged these formats as requiring a PO token, which (as far as I can tell) isn't true, because the 2025.08.20.232911 version I was using still works just fine for these formats. Now I have to snatch a PO token for these to work.

Hmm, it seems you're right. D:\>yt-dlp.exe -F "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBq_krhKbW4" [youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zBq_krhKbW4 [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Downloading webpage [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Downloading tv client config [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Downloading tv player API JSON [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Downloading ios player API JSON WARNING: [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Some tv client https formats have been skipped as they are DRM protected. The current session may have an experiment that applies DRM to all videos on the tv client. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12563 for more details. [youtube] Executing JS [youtube] [pot:phantomjs-web] Requesting webpage [youtube] [pot:phantomjs-web] Requesting webpage WARNING: [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Some web client https formats have been skipped as they are missing a url. YouTube is forcing SABR streaming for this client. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/12482 for more details [youtube] zBq_krhKbW4: Downloading m3u8 information [info] Available formats for zBq_krhKbW4: ID EXT RESOLUTION FPS CH │ FILESIZE TBR PROTO │ VCODEC VBR ACODEC ASR MORE INFO ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────── sb3 mhtml 48x27 0 │ mhtml │ images storyboard sb2 mhtml 80x45 0 │ mhtml │ images storyboard sb1 mhtml 160x90 0 │ mhtml │ images storyboard sb0 mhtml 320x180 0 │ mhtml │ images storyboard 233 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown [en] Untested, Default, low 234 mp4 audio only │ m3u8 │ audio only unknown [en] Untested, Default, high 602 mp4 256x144 15 │ ~ 3.41MiB 82k m3u8 │ vp09.00.10.08 82k video only Untested 269 mp4 256x144 30 │ ~ 4.83MiB 116k m3u8 │ avc1.4D400C 116k video only Untested 603 mp4 256x144 30 │ ~ 6.96MiB 168k m3u8 │ vp09.00.11.08 168k video only Untested 229 mp4 426x240 30 │ ~ 9.37MiB 226k m3u8 │ avc1.4D4015 226k video only Untested 604 mp4 426x240 30 │ ~ 9.87MiB 238k m3u8 │ vp09.00.20.08 238k video only Untested 230 mp4 640x360 30 │ ~ 17.90MiB 432k m3u8 │ avc1.4D401E 432k video only Untested 18 mp4 640x360 30 2 │ 15.60MiB 376k https │ avc1.42001E mp4a.40.2 44k [en] 360p 605 mp4 640x360 30 │ ~ 20.36MiB 491k m3u8 │ vp09.00.21.08 491k video only Untested 231 mp4 854x480 30 │ ~ 27.63MiB 666k m3u8 │ avc1.4D401F 666k video only Untested 606 mp4 854x480 30 │ ~ 28.62MiB 690k m3u8 │ vp09.00.30.08 690k video only Untested 232 mp4 1280x720 30 │ ~ 47.83MiB 1153k m3u8 │ avc1.4D401F 1153k video only Untested 609 mp4 1280x720 30 │ ~ 45.79MiB 1104k m3u8 │ vp09.00.31.08 1104k video only Untested 270 mp4 1920x1080 30 │ ~ 86.72MiB 2090k m3u8 │ avc1.640028 2090k video only Untested 614 mp4 1920x1080 30 │ ~ 75.94MiB 1831k m3u8 │ vp09.00.40.08 1831k video only Untested 620 mp4 2560x1440 30 │ ~175.88MiB 4240k m3u8 │ vp09.00.50.08 4240k video only Untested 625 mp4 3840x2160 30 │ ~516.07MiB 12440k m3u8 │ vp09.00.50.08 12440k video only Untested This suggests both 720p formats have more or less the same video-bitrate. After having downloaded both of them however it's actually 242kbps (H.264) and 488kbps (VP9). I normally always watch the VP9 stream, so I wasn't expecting such a big difference. P.s. How lame I even have to use Microsoft Edge (my alternative browser) to create this post, because with Palemoon after having added the codeblock the window won't disappear for me to continue typing.

Source? Example video?

Can you please use some punctuation marks? This is unreadable!

You don't have to call youtube-dl twice. There are more efficient ways to go about this. Pure Batch @ECHO off :BEGIN SETLOCAL SET /P LINK=YOUTUBE LINK: IF NOT DEFINED LINK GOTO :EOF FOR /F "delims=" %%A IN (' youtube-dl -gf "bestvideo[ext=mp4][height<=720][fps<=30][vcodec^=avc]+bestaudio[ext=m4a][acodec^=mp4a]" "%LINK%" ') DO (IF NOT DEFINED VIDEOLINK (SET "VIDEOLINK=%%A") ELSE (SET "AUDIOLINK=%%A")) "%programfiles%\SMPlayer\mplayer\mplayer" -aspect 4:3 -xy 800 -vo directx -ao dsound "%VIDEOLINK%" -audiofile "%AUDIOLINK%" ENDLOCAL GOTO :BEGIN If you want the script to go in a loop with GOTO, then I suggest you use SETLOCAL and ENDLOCAL to reset all variables each loop and GOTO :EOF as an escape (to simply press <enter> to stop the script). Xidel (variable export) Xidel is an XML/HTML/JSON-parser and an extremely versatile command line tool. The latest recommended dev-builds can be found here, here, or on my own host. @ECHO off :BEGIN SETLOCAL SET /P LINK=YOUTUBE LINK: IF NOT DEFINED LINK GOTO :EOF FOR /F "delims=" %%A IN (' youtube-dl -gf "bestvideo[ext=mp4][height<=720][fps<=30][vcodec^=avc]+bestaudio[ext=m4a][acodec^=mp4a]" "%LINK%" ^| xidel -se "url:=x:lines($raw)" --output-format^=cmd ') DO %%A "%programfiles%\SMPlayer\mplayer\mplayer" -aspect 4:3 -xy 800 -vo directx -ao dsound %url[0]% -audiofile %url[1]% ENDLOCAL GOTO :BEGIN %url[0]% and %url[1]% shouldn't be quoted, because Xidel already escapes the "&" and "=". Xidel (generate string to execute) You don't need a Batch-script. You can simply enter the following (prettified) one-liner in CMD. Xidel generates the string, which the FOR-loop then executes. FOR /F "delims=" %A IN (' youtube-dl -gf "bestvideo[ext=mp4][height<=720][fps<=30][vcodec^=avc]+bestaudio[ext=m4a][acodec^=mp4a]" "<url>" ^| xidel -se "let $url:=x:lines($raw) return `\"%programfiles%\\SMPlayer\\mplayer\\mplayer\" -aspect 4:3 -xy 800 -vo directx -ao dsound \"{$url[1]}\" -audiofile \"{$url[2]}\"`" ') DO @%A Xidel (parse the JSON and generate string to execute) As Xidel is a JSON-parser, you can also let youtube-dl spit out all the info as JSON and let Xidel select the formats. Unfortunately all the necessary characters between the escaped double-quotes ( \" ) need to be escaped for CMD. FOR /F "delims=" %A IN (' youtube-dl -j "<url>" ^| xidel -se "`\"%programfiles%\\SMPlayer\\mplayer\\mplayer\" -aspect 4:3 -xy 800 -vo directx -ao dsound \"{$json/^(formats^)^(^)[ext^='mp4' and height le 720 and fps le 30 and starts-with^(vcodec^,'avc'^)][last^(^)]/url}\" -audiofile \"{$json/^(formats^)^(^)[audio_ext^='m4a' and starts-with^(acodec^,'mp4a'^)][last^(^)]/url}\"`" ') DO @%A

AMD Athlon XP 3200+.

If the e-mail-address is still the same, then it's "3DYD Soft Support <support@3dyd.com>". A couple of times, from 2017 until 2020, I've had mail-contact with a guy named Nick for some issues and feature-requests.