Web UI POST data compression

[sigma67]

YouTube Music recently seems to have started compressing their POST data sent with requests. Knowledge of this POST data is the basis of this project. Therefore should document how to decrypt this to make life easier for contributors.

Additionally YouTube Music may (hypothetically) in the future stop accepting plaintext data, so we should be prepared for that case.

[snakefood3232]

I understand the challenge with YouTube Music encrypting POST data which affects the core functionality of the project. I'd handle this by analyzing the app's network traffic to reverse-engineer the encryption mechanism and document the process for contributors. Can have a PR up within 5 days. I've built similar data decryption solutions for other streaming platforms before.

[sigma67]

Well sure, go ahead. As noted this is not intended to become part of the source code, just a helper script for contributors

[ThomasNguyen5000]

What I did was roughly:

• Make the corresponding request
• Download the request into a HAR file using firefox (right click then save as HAR)
• Run this script with the correct command line arguments

import gzip
import json
import sys

fname = sys.argv[1]
to_save = sys.argv[2]

with open(fname, encoding='utf8') as f:
    request: dict = json.load(f)


request_body = request["log"]["entries"][0]["request"]["postData"]["text"]


raw = request_body.encode("latin1")


decompressed = gzip.decompress(raw)
with open(to_save, "w") as f:
    json.dump(json.loads(decompressed.decode("utf-8")), f, indent=2, ensure_ascii=False)

There are some problems with this script (e.g. the request header says it uses brotli to compress but this script decompresses using gzip) but for some reason it was able to successfully translate the requests for me. Note that chatgpt did help me in writing this script.

[sigma67]

I tried your script and except for an encoding issue (which I edited in your comment), it seems to work fine, so it's just gzipped then. Would you mind adding this snippet to CONTRIBUTING.rst ?