31–35 of 35 posts
Yt-dlp os a powerhouse of the free internet. To break free from walled gardens, I've started to use Seal, an open source F-Droid Android app. It's just a shell over yt-dlp. Unfortunately it started to fail to download some videos. Do you have any tips for better use?
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,…
yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx --cookies-from-browser
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> 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.…
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 mounts your host /home dir into the guest /home 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.
Yt-dlp os a powerhouse of the free internet. To break free from walled gardens, I've started to use Seal, an open source F-Droid Android app. It's just a shell over yt-dlp. Unfortunately it started to fail to download some videos. Do you have any tips for better use?
Update the app and yt-dlp.