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bashonly edited this page 2023-07-23 18:33:09 -05:00
Table of Contents

Known issues

See this pinned issue for a list of some important currently known issues and the bugtracker for a full list of issues.

The yt-dlp in my Package Manager is outdated/broken

Unfortunately, there is nothing we can do if your distribution serves an outdated/broken version. You should report this to the package maintainer or your distribution in their bugtracker or support forum.

As a last resort, you can also uninstall the version installed by your package manager and follow our installation instructions to install the latest version.

Do I need any other programs?

yt-dlp works reasonably well on its own on most sites. However, some sites - most notably YouTube - serve higher quality formats as separate audio and video. You will need ffmpeg to download and merge such formats. yt-dlp also uses many other optional dependencies for additional features. See Dependencies for more information.

I extracted a video URL, but it does not play on another machine / in my web browser

It depends a lot on the service. In many cases, requests for the video (to download/play it) must come from the same IP address and with the same cookies and/or HTTP headers. Use the --cookies option to write the required cookies into a file, and advise your downloader to read cookies from that file. Some sites also require a common user agent to be used; manually pass a desired User-Agent to yt-dlp with --add-headers. You should also look at any headers/options yt-dlp adds to the download with --print http_headers/--print downloader_options. Notably, YouTube throttles any request with an http chunk size of > 10MB.

Please bear in mind that some download protocols are not supported by browsers out of the box. If you wish to download such URLs without yt-dlp, your own downloader must support these.

If you want to play the video on a machine that is not running yt-dlp, you can relay the video content from the machine that runs yt-dlp. You can use -o - to let yt-dlp stream a video to stdout, or simply allow the player to download the files written by yt-dlp in turn.

Video URL contains an ampersand & and I'm getting some strange output [1] 2839 or 'v' is not recognized as an internal or external command

That's actually the output from your shell. Since ampersand is one of the special shell characters it's interpreted by the shell preventing you from passing the whole URL to yt-dlp. To disable your shell from interpreting the ampersands (or any other special characters) you have to either put the whole URL in quotes or escape them with a backslash (which approach will work depends on your shell).

For example if your URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc you should end up with following command:

yt-dlp "https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc"

or

yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4\&v=BaW_jenozKc

Similar quoting is needed for other options that contain special characters or spaces.

Output template and Windows batch files

If you are using an output template inside a Windows batch file then you must escape plain percent characters (%) by doubling, so that -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" should become -o "%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s". However you should not touch %'s that are not plain characters, e.g. environment variables for expansion should stay intact: -o "C:\%HOMEPATH%\Desktop\%%(title)s.%%(ext)s"

File name too long

Each OS and filesystem has a limit to the the length of a filename. If you are getting this error, then the filename you are trying to save has exceeded this limit. To fix this, use output template to set a smaller filename. The Python string formatting operations will be helpful here. For example, %(uploader).30B - %(title).200B.%(ext)s will shorten the uploader name to 30 bytes and the title to 200 bytes. If you want this for all of your downloads, put the option into your configuration file.

Downloading clips and cutting out Sponsor sections is inaccurate

Video files cannot be cut at exact timestamps without re-encoding. yt-dlp does not re-encode the video by default, even when cutting is required. You can use --force-keyframes-at-cuts to force re-encoding; however, this process is slow - there is no way around this.

HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests or 402: Payment Required

These two error codes indicate that the service is blocking your IP address because of overuse. Usually this is a soft block meaning that you can gain access again after solving CAPTCHA. Just open a browser and solve a CAPTCHA the service suggests you and after that pass cookies to yt-dlp. Note that if your machine has multiple external IPs then you should also pass exactly the same IP you've used for solving CAPTCHA with --source-address. Also you may need to pass a User-Agent HTTP header of your browser with --user-agent.

If this is not the case (no CAPTCHA suggested to solve by the service) then you can contact the service and ask them to unblock your IP address, or - if you have acquired a whitelisted IP address already - use the --proxy or --source-address options to select another IP address.

On Windows, how should I set up ffmpeg and yt-dlp? Where should I put the exe files?

If you put yt-dlp and ffmpeg in the same directory that you're running the command from, it will work, but that's rather cumbersome.

To make a different directory work - either for ffmpeg, or for yt-dlp, or for both - simply create the directory (say, C:\Users\<User name>\bin), put all the executables directly in there, and then set your PATH environment variable to include that directory.

From then on, after restarting your shell, you will be able to access both yt-dlp and ffmpeg (and yt-dlp will be able to find ffmpeg) by simply typing yt-dlp or ffmpeg, no matter what directory you're in.

How do I put downloads into a specific folder?

Use the -P "path/to/folder" to specify a path and an -o to specify an output template. If you want this for all of your downloads, put the option into your configuration file.

How do I download a video starting with a -?

Either prepend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= or separate the ID from the options with --:

yt-dlp -- -wNyEUrxzFU
yt-dlp "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wNyEUrxzFU"

How do I pass cookies to yt-dlp?

Passing cookies to yt-dlp is a good way to workaround login when a particular extractor does not implement it explicitly. Another use case is working around CAPTCHA some websites require you to solve in particular cases in order to get access (e.g. YouTube, CloudFlare).

The easiest way to pass cookies is to let yt-dlp extract it from your browser (say, Chrome) using --cookies-from-browser chrome. In Linux, this searches for config in location ~/.config/google-chrome. In case you install Chrome using Flatpak, the config is located in ~/.var/app/com.google.Chrome. To pass the cookies from this location use --cookies-from-browser chrome:~/.var/app/com.google.Chrome/

If you wish to manually pass cookies, use the --cookies option, for example: --cookies /path/to/cookies/file.txt.

You can export your cookies to a text file without any third-party software by using yt-dlp's --cookies-from-browser option in conjunction with the --cookies option, for example: yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser chrome --cookies cookies.txt. yt-dlp will extract the browser cookies and save them to the filepath specified after --cookies. The resulting text file can then be used with the --cookies option. Note though that this method exports your browser's cookies for ALL sites (even if you passed a URL to yt-dlp), so take care in not letting this text file fall into the wrong hands.

You may also use a conforming browser extension for exporting cookies, such as Get cookies.txt LOCALLY for Chrome or cookies.txt for Firefox. As with any browser extension, be careful about what you install. If you had previously installed the "Get cookies.txt" (not "LOCALLY") Chrome extension, it's recommended to uninstall it immediately; it has been reported as malware and removed from the Chrome Web Store.

Note that the cookies file must be in Mozilla/Netscape format and the first line of the cookies file must be either # HTTP Cookie File or # Netscape HTTP Cookie File. Make sure you have correct newline format in the cookies file and convert newlines if necessary to correspond with your OS, namely CRLF (\r\n) for Windows and LF (\n) for Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, macOS, etc.). HTTP Error 400: Bad Request when using --cookies is a good sign of invalid newline format.

How do I stream directly to media player?

You will first need to tell yt-dlp to stream media to stdout with -o -, and also tell your media player to read from stdin (it must be capable of this for streaming) and then pipe former to latter. For example, streaming to VLC can be achieved with:

yt-dlp -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc -

If you have ffmpeg, you may want to use -o - --downloader ffmpeg -f "bv*+ba/b" when streaming to stdout to get the best available quality.

How do I download only new videos from a playlist?

Use download-archive feature. With this feature you should initially download the complete playlist with --download-archive /path/to/download/archive/file.txt that will record identifiers of all the videos in a special file. Each subsequent run with the same --download-archive will download only new videos and skip all videos that have been downloaded before. Note that only successful downloads are recorded in the file.

For example, at first,

yt-dlp --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

will download the complete PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re playlist and create a file archive.txt. Each subsequent run will only download new videos if any:

yt-dlp --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

How can I detect whether a given URL is supported by yt-dlp?

For one, have a look at the list of supported sites. Note that it can sometimes happen that the site changes its URL scheme (say, from https://example.com/video/1234567 to https://example.com/v/1234567) and yt-dlp reports an URL of a service in that list as unsupported. In that case, simply report a site-bug.

It is not possible to detect whether a URL is supported or not. That's because yt-dlp contains a generic extractor which matches all URLs. You may be tempted to disable the generic extractor, but the generic extractor not only allows users to extract videos from lots of websites that embed a video from another service, but may also be used to extract video from a service that it's hosting itself. Therefore, we don't recommend disabling it. However, if you still wish to, you can disable it using --ies default,-generic.

If you want to find out whether a given URL is supported, simply call yt-dlp with it. If you get no videos back, chances are the URL is either not referring to a video or unsupported. You can find out which by examining the output (if you run yt-dlp on the console) or catching an UnsupportedError exception if you run it from a Python program.

Why do I need to go through that much red tape when filing bugs?

Despite the extensive bug reporting instructions, Many of the issue reports we get are useless, for instance because people used ancient versions, because of simple syntactic errors (not in yt-dlp but in general shell usage), because the problem was already reported multiple times before, because people did not actually read an error message, even if it said "please install ffmpeg", because people did not mention the URL they were trying to download and many more simple, easy-to-avoid problems, many of whom were totally unrelated to yt-dlp. So the issue template forces people to go through the red tape to make sure that they actually read the instructions and that they are not wasting our time.

yt-dlp is an open-source project manned by too few volunteers, so we'd rather spend time fixing bugs where we are certain none of those simple problems apply, and where we can be reasonably confident to be able to reproduce the issue without asking the reporter repeatedly. As such, the output of yt-dlp -Uv <rest of your comamnd> is really all that's required to file an issue. The issue template also guides you through some basic steps you can do, such as checking that your version of yt-dlp is current.

How can I speed up work on my issue?

(Also known as: Help, my important issue not being solved!)

The yt-dlp core developer team is quite small. While we do our best to solve as many issues as possible, sometimes that can take quite a while. To speed up your issue, here's what you can do:

First of all, please do report the issue at our issue tracker. That allows us to coordinate all efforts by users and developers, and serves as a unified point. Bug reports will not be accepted by any other communication channel.

Please make sure to read the bug reporting instructions. A lot of bug reports lack the necessary information. At the time of writing this, over 25% of all issues have been closed as invalid/duplicates. A lot of developer time is wasted triaging and answering such issues.

You are always welcome to take matters into your own hands and submit a pull request (or pay somebody else to do so). Make sure to read the contributing guidelines when you do.

Why am I getting an incorrect codec parameters error from ffmpeg when downloading or postprocessing?

The error message may also include:

  • Could not write header for output file #0
  • Error number -22 occurred
  • Invalid argument

Older versions of ffmpeg only have experimental support for Opus audio in an mp4 or webm container, and will throw this error if -strict -2 is not passed as an argument.

The best solution to this problem is to update ffmpeg. If you cannot or do not want to update, you can add this to your yt-dlp command:

--postprocessor-args "ffmpeg:-strict -2"

I'm getting HTTP Error 403 and the site has an open issue on the tracker that's labeled "Cloudflare-related". What can I do?

The 403 errors are coming from Cloudflare; their anti-bot fingerprinting is determining that yt-dlp is not a web browser and blocking yt-dlp's requests to the site you are trying to download from.

There is a workaround for this. It requires cookies from a browser with the same IP address that you will be using with yt-dlp. Follow these steps:

  1. Refresh your cookies in browser by navigating to the site you are trying to download from. If you have not done this within the past 30 minutes, you will need to do it again

  2. Find your browser's User-Agent string; you need the entire string (starting with Mozilla/5.0) and it needs to be up-to-date (i.e. if your browser updates, you'll need to get its new UA string with the current version)

    • the simplest way is to type "my user-agent" into duckduckgo, google, etc.
    • for Firefox browsers, you can find the user-agent by navigating to about:support
    • for Chromium-based browsers, you can find it in chrome://version (or your vendor prefix like brave://version, etc)

  3. Pass your browser's user-agent to yt-dlp with --user-agent "USERAGENT" along with --cookies-from-browser firefox

    • replace USERAGENT with your actual full user-agent string you got from step 2
    • replace firefox with the browser that you are using to browse the site
    • Or, if you'd rather use a cookies file instead of having yt-dlp extract cookies from your browser, you can use the --cookies option, e.g. --cookies cookies.txt. Note that the cookies need to be exported from a fresh browser session (see step 1) within the past 30 minutes. More info on exporting cookies

NOTE: This method reportedly works best with Firefox, and some users have reported problems getting it to work with Edge.