BTW the year is 2026 and we've got LLMs, is there, at long last, an easy way to have an YouTube downloader I can run in a container (say with Podman) that actually works?

Do I need to be logged in with a Google account for it to work?

I always, since decades I want to say, ran into troubles whenever I download Youtube vids (no matter which tool I use, yt-dlp or other). It works, then doesn't anymore.

Are you simply, reliably, downloading Youtube vids? How? From a VM? From a container? From your main machine while being logged on?

P.S: congrats to the guys at Google, you sure made that hard

▲ konart 20 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Not sure about container but

    yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx --cookies-from-browser <your_browser_here>

Works 100% of time for me. Obviously I do not download 10k videos daily so I may just jump over time when it is broken...

▲ amlib 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You always had to keep whatever youtube video downloader you were using updated at a minimum. For a good while login cookies were only required for downloading restricted videos (whatever youtube considered 18+). Now you need half a web browser to do anything and the update cadence is even crazier.

▲

TacticalCoder 2 hours ago | parent [-]

> You always had to keep whatever youtube video downloader you were using updated at a minimum.

Of course. I always try with the latest versions of yt-dlp.

> For a good while login cookies were only required for downloading restricted videos (whatever youtube considered 18+). Now you need half a web browser to do anything and the update cadence is even crazier.

Yeah at some point in the past I had it mostly working. But basically now, what should I do? Maybe host a VM with an actual browser (not headless: just the real thing) and log into a Google account and then what, use yt-dlp from the same IP?

Basically I don't get it: no clue what needs to be done for YouTube downloads to work reliably (and I'm not talking 18+ stuff: actually I had zero idea there were even vids considered 18+ on YouTube).

	▲	amlib a few seconds ago \| parent [-]
		>Yeah at some point in the past I had it mostly working. But basically now, what should I do? Maybe host a VM with an actual browser (not headless: just the real thing) and log into a Google account and then what, use yt-dlp from the same IP? What I've been doing is sshing to my main pc running fedora that has a legit firefox with my google/youtube cookies, have a distrobox with archlinux on it, entering that machine and then running yt-dlp there. Since distrobox has accces to your /home dir it can easily source cookies from your host pc. The reason for Archlinux is that it seams to do a much better job than Fedora at keeping yt-dlp updated and with the necessary dependencies to successfully download videos. So this synergy between your main machine (where google cant't tell you are illegitimate) + a guest machine with the "clandestine" software (in google's view lol) all stitched together by distrobox works well.

▲ sampullman 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Somebody is doing it, given all the ad ridden free YouTube download sites that exist.

	▲	TacticalCoder 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah but these are really impossible to use, which is why I tried to host my own, ad-free (and for my own use), yt-dlp wrapped in a OCI container but I never had much success : (