youtube-dl is throttled by Google, use alternative
Youtube-dl downloading seems to be throttled by Google to about 60kB/s. Playback without constant buffering is only possible at very low resolutions. This is the same behaviour as I noticed with the Pinephone Python app Mootube (https://github.com/ninebysix/MooTube) when it was using youtube-dl.
There is a replacement package yt-dlp (https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp) that uses a different Youtube access method, I believe via an Android API. Maybe you can use that? At the moment removing youtube-dl and installing yt-dlp doesn't work, though for MooTube it did.
Edited by Chris Billington