Bypass age restriction

[CoachYT1]

It would be great if ReVanced could bypass the age restrictions.

[oSumAtrIX]

Definitely a good idea, it should be possible, theres that one extension which can do that on the browser.

[CoachYT1]

Definitely a good idea, it should be possible, theres that one extension which can do that on the browser.

Yeah, I use it with Tampermonkey

https://github.com/zerodytrash/Simple-YouTube-Age-Restriction-Bypass/

[coolesding]

still works today

[pukkandan]

Not sure how easy/difficult this is to implement in re-vanced, but here's the details of what that extension does:

Youtube videos can be roughly categorized into 4 tiers based on their embeddability. See yt-dlp/yt-dlp#575 (comment). Age-gated videos in tiers 1-3 can be bypassed by spoofing certain "clients" in the INNERTUBE requests

• tier 1 can be bypassed with ANDROID_EMBEDDED_PLAYER/WEB_EMBEDDED_PLAYER
• We used to be able to bypass tiers 2-3 by setting clientScreen=EMBED in the request (Ref: [YouTube] Tier 2 age-gate bypass implementation yt-dlp/yt-dlp#575) but this bypass is now patched
• Currently, tiers 1-3 can by bypassed by using the TVHTML5_SIMPLY_EMBEDDED_PLAYER client (Ref: [YouTube] Add new age-gate bypass yt-dlp/yt-dlp#3233)
• None of these solve the account verification requirement inside EU. But that requirement can be bypassed by using WEB_CREATOR (ANDROID_CREATOR also works, but has less formats than other clients) IF the user is signed in with an unverified youtube account. Afaik, there is no client that can bypass this without an account

There is no known client-side bypass for tier 4 videos (without logging in). The only way to circumvent them is to use an account proxy. Note that some videos like gKVjWNv9V8Q has a gcr parameter in the playback URL. These can only be accessed from the same country (by IP) as where the link was generated. So, for such videos, the playback will need to be performed over a proxy in the same country as the account proxy. Since this solution needs third party services to work, it is understandable if the devs are unwilling to accept this.

Parameters for the above-mentioned clients: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/e6f868a63c15f576152733a1508f474b5e5bd1ef/yt_dlp/extractor/youtube.py#L77-L233
More info about various clients: https://github.com/zerodytrash/YouTube-Internal-Clients

Correction: TVHTML5_SIMPLY_EMBEDDED_PLAYER works to bypass tiers 1-3 even in EU. WEB_CREATOR is only needed to access tier 4 videos

[Sculas]

What is the use case for this feature? Unauthenticated watching of age gated video's?

[RobinRMC]

What is the use case for this feature? Unauthenticated watching of age gated video's?

YouTube also age-restrict videos that aren't even inappropriate. Look at the channel of lukeafk for example. A few of his videos are age-restricted, while there is no inappropriate content.

[Sculas]

I already got a reply for this in the Discord a while ago.

Lately, YouTube requires users to send them their IDs and/or credit cards before they're allowed to watch age-restricted videos. Understandably, a lot of users don't want to do that. That's the motivation behind this suggestion.

To my knowledge, the API blocks the request for age-restricted videos if a user is either unauthenticated or does not have permission to watch age-restricted videos, so bypassing this will be quite hard to do, especially by means of patching. "We'd have to get the big guns out", so to say.

To respond to @RobinRMC's message, does the above also apply to you? Or if not, why would you want this if you're allowed to watch age-restricted videos anyway?

[pukkandan]

Lately, YouTube requires users to send them their IDs and/or credit cards before they're allowed to watch age-restricted videos.

Note that this happens only in the EU (ie, if your account is EU based - VPN don't help)

[CoachYT1]

What is the use case for this feature? Unauthenticated watching of age gated video's?

Also because i don't want to provide my credit card or my identity card to watch age restricted videos.

[Degl1]

Would be nice if you could use this method to bypass the children's videos. Because children's videos don't play in the miniplayer.

[fillwithjoy1]

Isn't the miniplayer pausing a client side fix? Should be able to hook into the video player and cut off the code responsible for auto pausing

[oSumAtrIX]

That's already present as a patch

[coolesding]

unfortunately it isn't. there's only bypassing the viewer discretion popup. I still have to copy the link and open it in a browser running the user script to watch videos with ID collection

[oSumAtrIX]

It is and the video is not being paused

[coolesding]

ill check again

edit 1; unless you mean kids bypass, which i think would be weird to select as the answer to the main question
edit 2; it still blocks age restricted videos