Heads up, YouTube discontinuing older version on desktop soon

[yausername]

This might affect us.

Enter 2020 and the older versions are missing many of the new features and design improvements we’ve introduced over the past 3 years, including top requests based on your feedback (see most recent update here). That's why the older version will be going away in March and you'll only be able to access newer desktop versions to enjoy the best of YouTube.

https://support.google.com/youtube/thread/27596769

[TobiGr]

Uuh f***. We need to switch to the new version asap. I guess the best way is to create a new branch and switch the user agent and then fix everything which seems to be broken.

[TobiGr]

Which user agent is the best to use?

[TobiGr]

Using Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:54.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/73.0 changes everything...
Most info about the current video or channel is stored in window["ytInitialData"].
I have created a new branch: yt_new.

[B0pol]

How do you read the json file?
Firefox says json has errors, and shows nothing (it worked well for Peertube json files)
For the YoutubeStreamExtractor, I used this website, it said it has error but was still formatting
But for the channelExtractor, it says it has too many errors and it can't format it.

So do you have any tips or you are reading the unformatted file?

[wb9688]

@B0pol: I could read the JSON file perfectly fine. Anyway, I'm already working on it.

[TobiGr]

@B0pol I've zipped most important sites: documents.zip

[B0pol]

perfect, thank you

[B0pol]

Ok I found why it bugged:
the files I got written didn't include the quotes "
What i did was:

createFile("yt_new/initialData.json", extractor.getPlayerResponse().toString());
with createFile:

public static void createFile(String path, String content) throws IOException {
    BufferedWriter writer = new BufferedWriter(new FileWriter(path));
    writer.write(content);
    writer.flush();
    writer.close();
}

I read nanojson git and the proper way to do it isn't an instance of JsonObject.toString(), but
String json = JsonWriter.string(JsonObject or JsonArray);

[TobiGr]

@Poolitzer Do you have time to prepare a blog post? We are preparing a new release to address this before everything stops working.

[Poolitzer]

Always

[B0pol]

It's april and old youtube is still available by adding &app=desktop in url :o

[Poolitzer]

How dare they tricking us into using their new version which offers way more features like those fancy new feed streams and stuff.