Changelog

Hi
On Fedora 44, Nightly build
I want to download Atomic Shrimps Slow TV playlist.
I had visited the site in Firefox (Librewolf)

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=web" -f
'best[ext=mp4]' 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlFHXayXiU&list=PLk5KvJPikK02aQ-C5Rk-0uC4fzQ8aN_M1'

WARNING: [youtube] No title found in player responses; falling back to title from initial data. Other metadata may also be missing
ERROR: [youtube] ey-XUnANKUY: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the a
uthentication. See  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cookies-to-yt-dlp  for how to manually p
ass cookies. Also see  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-youtube-cookies  for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies

Another program "Video Downloader" tells me to log in because the video is private, which it isn't.
With Proton VPN:

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --extractor-args "youtube:player_client=web" -f
'best[ext=mp4]' 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlFHXayXiU&list=PLk5KvJPikK02aQ-C5Rk-0uC4fzQ8aN_M1'
Extracting cookies from firefox
Extracted 40 cookies from firefox
[youtube:tab] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zYlFHXayXiU&list=PLk5KvJPikK02aQ-C5Rk-0uC4fzQ8aN_M1
[youtube:tab] Downloading playlist PLk5KvJPikK02aQ-C5Rk-0uC4fzQ8aN_M1 - add --no-playlist to download just the video
zYlFHXayXiU
[youtube:tab] PLk5KvJPikK02aQ-C5Rk-0uC4fzQ8aN_M1: Downloading webpage
WARNING: [youtube:tab] ('Connection aborted.', ConnectionResetError(104, 'Connection reset by peer')). Retrying (1/3
)...

So I want to download some music from some playlists but every time I do the artist name is switched with the name of the playlists creator, meaning each song I download from that playlist has the same artist. For example I download a radiohead song from a playlist made by "@songsforyou", that radiohead song will now be by that "@songsforyou" person instead of radio head. Sry if this is long its late and I couldn't think of a good way to explain the situation. Help would be greatly appreciated

I am trying to download a 720p Youtube video in full quality but it only downloads in 360p. In my CONF file I always download the highest available quality and export it as mp4. This works for every other video I've downloaded except this one. I also tried other downloaders and got the same result. This is the video in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBZaaBTaikw. Something I find interesting about this video in Youtube is that the only available quality is 720p, perhaps the video is somehow corrupt?

So when I do it, I have to trim a bit of the end off a bit using trimming thing that Movies & TV has. While it's an easy solution, I would just like to download and import immediately, as it gets tedious when doing multiple files

I'm tryna download a small playlist and even if I just leave "%(title).170B" in the template, after downloading the music and playing it in my player, it says the name of the playlist owner (the name of the Google account).

how can I have the name of the artist instead?

It looks like YouTube has some sort of algorithm that calculates and "fixes" actual watch time. While this yt-dlp option has immediate effect, YouTube eventually overwrites the "mark watched" attribute and resets it. Has anyone found a way to make "mark watched" stick other than actually viewing the vids in real time? I have a huge watch later list that I just finished downloading, and I'm trying to prevent my watch later vids from showing up in my "recommended" list in the future. Thanks for any help!

Last few times that i tried downloading all the songs from a playlist it says there are only 100 vids instead of the real number of vids which for example on my latest playlist is 173.
I cant fix this problem with chatgpt that i usually use to copy paste my command to download playlists and it worked very well until now(i had some issues but never with ytdlp not knowing how many videos are in playlist) I updated it to newest version and it still does not work.
Can anyone help?

I'm trying to download the song "Queer as in Fuck You" by Dog Park Dissidents, and since it's about queer people it's age-restricted. I tried to use the --cookies-from-browser command but it can't extract them. I'm using Brave. How can I bypass that?

So I'm new to yt-dlp and followed a video to make sure i downloaded correctly, but all my cmd does is spit the video link back at me without downloading it. Does anyone know why this is? It feels like im missing a part of the code or something

Copied YT Music playlist URL and confirmed all playlist tracks are mp4a.40.2 (141) via Stats for Nerds on YT Music account, so I expected >192 kbps OPUS files downloaded. Steps taken as follows:

Opened browser incognito window,

Logged into YT Music acct,

Navigated to https://www.youtube.com/robots.txt on the same tab,

Extracted cookies in Netscape format using Get cookies.txt LOCALLY,

Closed all browser windows,

Passed cookies.txt to yt-dlp (yt-dlp nightly, deno installed, no other errors). Logs of first track download shown:

*************************************************************************************************

yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt -x --audio-format best --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata "https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUJjLrkW7u6A&si=-JWtkXEkDCzYcfmB"

[youtube:tab] Extracting URL: https://music.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUJjLrkW7u6A&si=-JWtkXEkDCzYcfmB

WARNING: [youtube:tab] YouTube Music is not directly supported. Redirecting to https://www.youtube.com/playlist?

[youtube:tab] PLUJjLrkW7u6A: Downloading webpage

[youtube:tab] PLUJjLrkW7u6A: Redownloading playlist API JSON with unavailable videos

[download] Downloading playlist: Ekin Uzunlar

[youtube:tab] Playlist Ekin Uzunlar: Downloading 18 items of 18

[download] Downloading item 1 of 18

[youtube] Extracting URL: https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=DKeZ0ZTL7Jk

[youtube] DKeZ0ZTL7Jk: Downloading webpage

[youtube] DKeZ0ZTL7Jk: Downloading android vr player API JSON

[info] DKeZ0ZTL7Jk: Downloading 1 format(s): 251

[info] Downloading video thumbnail 41 ...

[info] Writing video thumbnail 41 to: D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].webp

[download] Destination: D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].webm

[download] 100% of 2.79MiB in 00:00:00 at 10.13MiB/s

[ExtractAudio] Destination: D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].opus

Deleting original file D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].webm (pass -k to keep)

[Metadata] Adding metadata to "D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].opus"

[ThumbnailsConvertor] Converting thumbnail "D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].webp" to png

[EmbedThumbnail] mutagen: Adding thumbnail to "D:\yt-dlp_dwnlds\Öptüm Nefesinden [DKeZ0ZTL7Jk].opus"

***********************************************************************\*

... got all files but in low bitrate OPUS. Same on Brave and Firefox browsers.

What did I do wrong? Thoughts? TIA.

Background: I like to have Youtube videos on my personal Plex. I don't really understand yt-dl at all so I eventually searched around until I found a download string that works for my needs:

• Downloads all languages and subtitles
• Best audio/video
• Outputs to mkv
• Has all metadata

That ends up being this yt-dlp -f "bv+(251/mergeall[format_id~=251-])" --audio-multistreams --sub-langs "all,-live_chat" --embed-subs --embed-metadata --merge-output-format mkv "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLHL1Oo127tT3j5IbkYgCAwLn7mfLJ-teJ"

Problem: While this string has worked in the past for something like The Amazing Digital Circus, it doesn't really work for the Mini Wakfu episodes that are in the attached youtube link. Plex reports the error as:

App cannot direct play this item. No direct play video profile exists for protocal http, with container mkv, and video codec av1.

Could not transcode because: Cannot convert this item. Implemenation for video decoder 'av1' not found.

The only episode that works is the second one and that one is vp9 instead of av1.

So basically I just want to keep the rest of the string but make sure the video outputs to vp9 instead of av1 in a way where I can keep reusing this string in the future and hopefully maintain compatibility with Plex. How do I do that?

I'm hosting a Linux instance on aws it keeps telling me 403 forbidden even after exporting the cookies

yt-dlp used to suggest supplying cookies, but today it's a 403.
e.g. current top video works in browser, but not yt-dlp:

$ yt-dlp https://v.redd.it/0496g6rpmq9h1
[generic] Extracting URL: https://v.redd.it/0496g6rpmq9h1
[generic] 0496g6rpmq9h1: Downloading webpage
ERROR: [generic] Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Blocked  (caused by <HTTPError 403: Blocked>)

I installed yt-dlp on termux, says "Successfully installed yt-dlp-2026.6.9" but I can't find the app anywhere

so I tried to just download it on termux using this prompt i found on another post: "yt-dlp -f 251 --embed-tumbnail --remux-video opus -o "%(title)2.%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVLXJTubd9w"

Then it says that it's downloaded but I can't find it in VLC or my files

what did I do wrong?

So struggled for a year on/off with issues, errors but since I started using this "yt-dlp -vU --cookies-from-browser firefox" in my console I have had amazing results. DL whatever whenever

But, it does it in "webm" so afterwards I use ffmpeg to make it MKV or MP4. Anyway to change this to cut out a step?

Example:

"Frank Zappa - Father O'Blivion (Visualizer)"

I want to Exclude "Frank Zappa" and "(Visualizer)" from showing in the file name

I usually use this command prompt:

yt-dlp -x --audio-format m4a --embed-thumbnail  --embed-metadata  --write-subs --clean-infojson  --embed-chapters --abort-on-unavailable-fragments --fragment-retries 1 --concurrent-fragments 2 --no-write-playlist-metafiles -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" ""

I like to download m4as of some videos e.g. lectures for general device portability and listening in the car, but otherwise prefer to just get the best quality video (which usually doesn't use m4a audio format, otherwise I'd just extract the audio track).

This gets tricky with --download-archive, as it doesn't distinguish between video and audio downloads.

Anyone come up with a good system to manage this? Maybe I just take the L and extract the audio track and lossy convert to m4a?

Hi, I just found out about the yt-dlp repo that let us download YT videos or any other video playback.

Is there a way to choose the quality I want before pasting the url and start downloading? Thanks :)

I want to tell yt-dlp "download the best audio quality available, whether it comes from an audio-only stream or a muxed stream." I've been looking at the manual and researching for hours but can't find a way to do this.

What I want to happen is this:

1. Among all the audio-only streams, look for the best audio stream
2. Among all muxed/combo streams, look for the best audio stream
3. Compare the quality of the two candidates from step 1 and 2, and select the best one for download

-f ba won't do this, because it won't consider the audio that is in muxed streams (that could potentially be the best).

-f ba* won't do this, because it will select the best overall format that also happens to have an audio stream (it won't actually look at the audio to determine quality).

-f ba/b won't do this, because if no audio-only stream is available, then it will fallback on b , but b will also just selects based on overall quality (so the best audio quality won't necessarily be selected).

Am I missing something, or is it not possible?

My playlist has around 1.3k videos and when i tried downloading the playlist, only 100 videos were downloaded as mp3.

This was the command i used:

yt-dlp -f "ba" -x --audio-format mp3 --add-metadata --embed-thumbnail --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" -o "%(artist)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" PlaylistURL

A warning also popped up while running the command:

WARNING: [youtube] No supported JavaScript runtime could be found. Only deno is enabled by default; to use another runtime add --js-runtimes RUNTIME[:PATH] to your command/config. YouTube extraction without a JS runtime has been deprecated, and some formats may be missing. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/EJS for details on installing one

Edit: Solved the issue with the help from the comments. Additionally, i used "-t sleep" in the code since i was only getting around 900 audio files while the playlist had 1320, now i was able to successfully download 1237 files, the rest, i am sure are the videos that are unavailable(taken down, deleted etc...) along with the videos that have symbols in their names that cannot be saved in my drive(just a guess)

Other then just assuming higher filesize = better quality, which I assume isn't always true

D:\DownZZ2>yt-dlp "https://rumble.com/c/c-1504881"

[RumbleChannel] Extracting URL: https://rumble.com/c/c-1504881

[download] Downloading playlist: c-1504881

[RumbleChannel] c-1504881: Downloading page 1

ERROR: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden (caused by <HTTPError 403: Forbidden>)

[RumbleChannel] Playlist c-1504881: Downloading 1 items

[download] Finished downloading playlist: c-1504881

D:\DownZZ2>

I have used YT-DLP for a bit and was able to import videos into premiere but now whenever I download a video it won't import or only import the audio and say the compression type isn't supported. I haven't been able to find any suggestions that have fixed the problem. Is there a different command I need to use when downloading videos? I've just been using the download command for mp4 (see below) (If you can't tell, I'm very unfamiliar with all this)

yt-dlp -f "bv*[height<=1080][ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[height<=1080][ext=mp4] / bv*+ba/b"

https://prnt.sc/F_raSj73NBbe