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.

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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 minute 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.