Question: It seems that `youtube-dl` is dead in the water since June 6, 2021 and it has reached a point where it [cannot handle YouTube's downloading speed throttling](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326) at all.

1. Does anyone know what has happened or will happen with it?
2. What about `yt-dlp`? Is it safe to switch to it? One of the reasons I'm asking this question is that it is not included in the official repos at all, whereas `youtube-dl` is.

Thank you.

Answer: 
`yt-dlp` appears reasonably safe (hence the >7K stars on Github). It is a fork of `youtube-dlc` (now also a dead project) which was a fork of `youtube-dl`.

As you can probably tell, it is much more active in terms of development and has many extra features such as better extractors and other options. In most cases, minimal to no changes are required when transitioning from one to the other. I transitioned a few weeks ago with no problems whatsoever.

As for what happened to the original, I'm not sure anyone has any idea, you could try opening an issue on Github asking about it, but don't expect any responses that aren't from the developers themselves to be reliable.

In general, I think `yt-dlp` is better anyway - they process pull requests and respond to issues a lot faster too. I don't see any drawbacks in using it for development over `youtube-dl`, except that because it constantly has new commits, it might be considered more unstable (but `youtube-dl` is currently inactive anyway, what choice do you have?).
There is an alternative in the ubuntu software center:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2PP6A.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/2PP6A.png)

Not tried it yet personally but there are good recent reviews:

[![enter image description here](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wt8lP.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/wt8lP.png)

AFAIK youtube-dl continues to work from the command line and I have not experienced any issues recently using it.