YouTube under Windows XP - Downloaders, players and browser support

[AstroSkipper]

A night's sleep always brings new ideas to light.  The 7-Zip commands for extracting can be simplified to remain completely relative in the path information such as I already did in the whole ytBATCH for Windows XP script ensemble. I will implement this in the next release. Sometimes, things are that simple.  

Edited April 23 by AstroSkipper
Update of content

[Cixert]

On 1/23/2024 at 10:29 PM, AstroSkipper said:

• ytBATCH for Windows XP 1.5 - A fork of ytBatch by @AstroSkipper which is a YouTube video and audio downloader script (actually rather a batch script ensemble).

And these are by no means all the YouTube Downloaders that still work under Windows XP.  So, there is no need to watch YouTube videos inside browsers under Windows XP on weak computers, although this is of course possible, too.

Cheers, AstroSkipper

Thanks for the corrections, it's a pleasure.
In the quote, you can see that version 1.5 is announced instead of version 1.6.
I'll try your modifications to see how it works now.
I use FAT32 as the system directory, without special permissions in drive D:\
I don't have any operating system on C:. I use that partition for system startup files and also as a shared program installation drive (it's not assigned as the system's default path). Since I have multiple operating systems, most programs are portable, so I don't have to install them on all of my operating systems.
Also, many viruses attack C: directly, so I avoid them. Additionally, many programs store junk in C:, and this way I detect it quickly.
In the case of ytBATCH, I followed the standard installation "D:\Archivos de programa" (the default path in Spanish for Program Files).
So far I have not encountered any program that caused problems because it had D:\ as the drive.

[AstroSkipper]

3 hours ago, Cixert said:

In the quote, you can see that version 1.5 is announced instead of version 1.6.

Thanks for replying! This is just a leftover and has now been edited by me. But the other announcements are correct and point to the most recent version.

[Lirk]

On 4/19/2025 at 9:16 PM, AstroSkipper said:

I have updated the YouTube files in the last XP-compatible PotPlayer version some days ago, taken from the most recent PotPlayer release. It works like a charm.  No problems with cookies or anything else here. BTW, this last XP-compatible, slightly older PotPlayer is still the best media player under Windows XP, IMHO.  

PotPlayer works too unstable, it too often gives "Server Error" messages. So, now I am using YT-DLP with MPC-HC (from YOUTUBE-DL-PLAYBACK.zip), also available with YOUTUBE-DL for SSE CPUs. It also sometimes gives "Certificates Error" messages, but this can be ignored.

[j7n]

Going to the YouTube site has become almost pointless because of the inability to comment. This issue may seem like it has gone away, but it's just encountered somewhat more rarely. If I look from another account,the comment isn't there, and I choose to edit a shadowbanned comment, it says "error" in red type and the comment disappears. Trying to get it to stick takes a long time (while waiting on the site on an old PC) and is usually unsuccessful. Removal of key words or their obfuscation with Greek letters or periods doesn't work.

The site's search feature is horrible, feeding the same titles repeatedly, and the performance is of course down at the bottom.

I suspect that watching on YouTube-DL is one contributing factor for the censorship. The system considers me a spammer who hasn't watched anything. Another factor is the controversy level of the topic, like politics, war, nationalism, nutrition, drugs, viruses, gender, and such. Comments seem less likely to stick there.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

8 hours ago, j7n said:

Going to the YouTube site has become almost pointless because of the inability to comment.

Sounds like an oddly "modern" metric to gauge a web site's usability.

Not for me, but yeah, "to each their own".

Edited yesterday at 12:07 PM by NotHereToPlayGames

[j7n]

Suppose you come to this forum and read something that sends your proverbial blood pressure up: that your favorite web browser sucks, feeds Chinese hackers and using WinXP is a threat to national security. You write a moderate rebuttal and everyone ignores it because they really can't see it. The AI has decided that using old software is unacceptable. You come back after a week, write something again including the word "boot.ίnί" and get a silly error. You remove all sensitive words, then obfuscate the word "sυcκs" and it still doesn't work.

Would you really come back and continue to read some BS without being able to respond? I would just use a search engine in case I had a problem to solve and not read everything.

[NotHereToPlayGames]

3 hours ago, j7n said:

"sυcκs"

There are some good AI-blocking lists for uBlock.  Unsure if they would remove what you are encountering.

Me?  I haven't used them.  I just use custom style sheets to hide the dumb AI content.  But I also use custom style sheets to also hide YouTube "comments".

So we are clearly two birds of a different feather.

Edited 13 hours ago by NotHereToPlayGames

[raddy]

On 7/19/2025 at 6:34 AM, j7n said:

If I look from another account,the comment isn't there,

If you sort comments by newest, you can see all "banned" messages.