I'm reasonably certain he'll think I'm over-reacting about the issue. Most people do.
Nevertheless, I would be interested in hearing more people chime in on whether or not these applications are still working and it's related to the YouTube API changes or just something going on with your system.
Disclaimer: I was "done" with PPC Macs in 2006 when I got an Intel iMac, and it benched faster than every G5 except the 2.7 (which beat it by a hair) and the Quad, which was almost twice as fast by the mere nature of being a $3300 or so machine that was at least twice as fast as every other G5 ever (except the 2.7, it's only like 1.97x as fast s the 2.7.)
So, where performance is necessary, PPC has been "done" for a long time. The G4 was bad when it was new, the G5 was really not much of an improvement, and the first cheap iMacs, MacBooks and MacBook Pros completely blew everything else out of the water. PowerPC had been behind a long time, and it was made worse by Apple's then-insistence on having complete control over the hardware. At the time, we heralded it as the sign of a good platform, but Apple was completely awful at hardware design, and most of the weird little problems G4s and G5s have today, they wouldn't have if Apple had let Motorola or IBM design the platform.
Where longevity is important, I'd argue the same. I run Windows 7 and Office 2010 on a ThinkPad that was built in 2003, and not only is it actually pretty sprightly navigating around the OS and running Office 2010, but I can use Spotify on it, 4kVD would have worked, and YouTube videos were playing just fine in IE11 when I last looked at it, which was maybe just about a month ago. (I've since moved and it's in a box I have yet to unpack.)
That system will be relevant to me until 2019 when Windows 7, Office 2010 and IE11 stop receiving security patches.
This next part is extremely tangential to the topic of "downloading youtube videos" but it's very related to the topic of "the viability of PowerPC Macs running OS X."
The other thing to note, and the reason why I specifically call out Windows 7's end-of-patches date, is because Mac OS X while not being a common target is, by default, pretty insecure, and security researchers and code auditors have been finding lots of problems with the code in UNIX systems. (Such as the BSD portion of Mac OS X, which is all of it except for the graphics, and even the graphics if you're using X11 stuff.)
Apple's not patching that stuff, and it is being used to compromise Linux and UNIX servers to send spam from them. There's no really good reason why a Mac couldn't be the victim to an attack like that.
It may be possible to compile some fixes for some of those issues, but the reason why I talk about "looking modern" is because a lot of people who really aren't very technical buy these things cheap off craigslist without knowing what they're getting into. It's very much like the time I bought a cheap Volvo wagon off CL, and then drove it for exactly one month before it blew up in my face and stranded me on the side of the '40. Except with insecure Macs, it's not just me or you that stands to lose out or be impacted. It's potentially anybody on any network to which you're connected (spam and faulty HTTP requests, plus things like NTP and DNS reflection take network throughput) as well as users of mailboxes that receive spam and phishing.
Cameron Kaiser has issued patches for some of these problems, like shellshock (which ironically, on Mac OS X, probably posed the least threat of anything I've mentioned.)
I admire the veracity of the users on this board, heck, I admire them when they're on 68kMLA as well, but I definitely wish that there was a bit more of a unified effort to address the security concerns on these systems.
Ironically, Mac OS 9 has none of these types of problems, and is essentially immune to being used as a spambot, unless you install ASIP or AIMS/EIMS on one and configure it wrong.
I may get another PPC Mac at some point, but it'll either be on a darknet or as a Mac OS 9 system.
