Re: Emms and youtube-dl

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> Someone is offering to add code to Emms which supports
> youtube-dl/ytdl. The FSF has a post about those programs here and
> youtube generally here:
> https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/whats-wrong-with-youtube.en.html
>
> Initially, I rejected the code because I thought that youtube-dl runs
> non-free javascript. But that FSF article says it does not. But still
> the other reasons in the article, mainly that youtube-dl is a fragile
> web-scraping kludge to access a resource which isn't committed to free
> access, I am hesitant to add the code.

AFAICT it's up to you: ethically, there is no problem with `youtube-dl`
and to the extent that it helps users avoid proprietary software I think
it's good to add support for it.

But yes, `youtube-dl` is a kludge and we should encourage people to use
services that are more friendly to our ideals, but in most cases I (as
a user) don't always get to choose where the video I need has been
uploaded (most of my uses of `youtube-dl` is to transfer the video to
a local PeerTube service ;-)


        Stefan