unable to downalod yt video

It's 7.30 on a beautiful Saturday morning. People are heading out for a wonderful weekend.

And what is @BlogPro doing? Well, he's about to help a dude download nasty videos from Youtube.

Okay listen,

These are age-restricted videos and are therefore under an authentication wall, which makes it difficult for most tools to fetch them.

It's doable though. And can be automated as well.

You will need 3 things, these are all 1-time setup - they may sound complex, but won't take more than a few minutes

Step 1 - YT-DLP

This is a fork of the popular Youtube-DL - much better IMO. This will make your life infinitely easy if you frequently download videos.

Go here https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#release-files

And under click Release files, click on yt-dlp.exe it should download instantly.

Now let's keep it in a file. I use the E:\ drive on my PC for nasty things. So I saved it in E:\youtube - you can save it anywhere. Just create a folder and drop it in.

STEP 2 - FFMPEG

Youtube messes with the videos a lot (like having audio and video seperated) - FFMPEG ensures everything is seamless

Go to the Github link below and download ffmpeg-2024-11-13-git-[B]322b240cea-essentials_build[/B].zip

https://github.com/GyanD/codexffmpeg/releases/tag/2024-11-13-git-322b240cea

Once downloaded, extract it and look inside the bin folder - you should find 3 files - ffmpeg.exe, ffprobe.exe, and ffplay.exe - copy them to the same folder as yt-dlp

So in my case, I copy them to E:\youtube

3. Cookie Editor (Only needed for Age Restricted Videos)

Visit https://cookie-editor.com/ and download the extension for your browser

Once downloaded, login to Youtube with an age verified account, then click on the cookie-editor extension.

It'll show you your cookies, at the bottom you'll find 4 options. Click on "Export" and select "Netscape". This will copy your cookies to the clipboard. Simply create a new file called cookies.txt and paste these cookies in it. Save it in the same folder as yt-dlp

That's it! You're done!

For Age Restricted Videos


Simply open command prompt, navigate to your yt-dlp directory with the cd command.

Then run

yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt <your-youtube-URL>

So in your case, I ran

yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt https://youtube.com/watch?v=52h_AS2fEl8&

And et voila!



For Regular Videos

You don't need the cookies. Just run

yt-dlp <your-youtube-url>

So like this

yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw75B8p09yE

sumitswaroop said:

other sites also not working

Click to expand...

That's true.

Jdownloader 2 works great for me