Should yt-dlp be used behind a VPN? (slrpnk.net)

submitted 3 months ago by Sunny@slrpnk.net to c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com

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Only recently discovered yt-dlp, despite its popularity. However I was wondering if I were to use this, should it be used behind a VPN when downloading videos off public websites?

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

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[-] Noxious@fedia.io 4 points 3 months ago

Well, you can change your IP as often as you want. You can go to a completely different ISP in a different country in a matter of seconds.

So if you are using one tool to access YouTube while being logged into Google on your browser, doesn't that defeat the purpose of the VPN?

Yeah, I didn't assume anyone in this community would log in to YouTube, but maybe I'm wrong

[-] warlaan@feddit.org 2 points 3 months ago

Unless you actively pay attention it's very easy to be logged into some Google service without noticing. At least I wouldn't be surprised if chrome background services kept me logged into my work Google Mail account and kept tracking my IP.

The biggest question is how meaningful the IP alone is. I don't know if VPNs assign people individual IP-adresses or if there's some kind of NAT in use where people share an IP with translated ports. If the information is "there's this individual VPN-user and we need to connect them to a name" then you shouldn't use (the same) VPN for everything, but if it's just "there's another request from the same VPN" then it's fine.