Thanks for this. It is weird how long it’s been. I totally forgot that Wireshark was once called Ethereal.
I hope that the DMCA takedown issue can be resolved reasonably, but it’s starting to seem more and more like a move off of Github is overdue. Especially in a world where anyone can stand up a Gitea or Gitlab CE instance.
I don't think it can be solved on Github.
"GitHub’s CEO suggested that YouTube-DL won’t be reinstated in its original form. But, the software may be able to return without the rolling cipher circumvention code and the examples of how to download copyrighted material."
https://torrentfreak.com/riaas-youtube-dl-takedown-ticks-of-...
This pretty much makes youtube-dl useless, since the "rolling cipher" is just downloading the same bit of js, inspecting it, and executing it, almost the way a web browser does (AIUI, the difference is that yt-dl inspects the js and picks out the function to run from it instead of just running it all verbatim). This counts as circumvention according to the DMCA, which leaves yt-dl little legal standing in the US.
Also note that the "examples of how to download copyrighted material" in the yt-dl tests were just code for getting the first few bytes of a number of RIAA-sequestered music videos. Small excerpts are usually allowed under Fair Use. The RIAA didn't really look into that detail.
On the plus side, this fork is active and not DMCA'ed, for now. I just turned to it because I needed a fix for Bandcamp that upstream yt-dl doesn't have: