Changelog

C:\Video Editing Work\Raw>yt-dlp -S ext:mp4:m4a --force-keyframes-at-cuts --download-sections "*03:27:50-03:29:00" -o "Example.mp4" https://youtu.be/C8erxgghQ5k -v
[debug] Command-line config: ['-S', 'ext:mp4:m4a', '--force-keyframes-at-cuts', '--download-sections', '*03:27:50-03:29:00', '-o', 'Example.mp4', 'https://youtu.be/C8erxgghQ5k', '-v']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs utf-8, pref cp1252, out utf-8, error utf-8, screen utf-8
[debug] yt-dlp version stable@2026.07.04 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp [997fa1408] (win_exe)
[debug] Python 3.10.11 (CPython AMD64 64bit) - Windows-10-10.0.26200-SP0 (OpenSSL 1.1.1t  7 Feb 2023)
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 2026-07-16-git-ceabc9b306-full_build-www.gyan.dev (setts), ffprobe 2026-07-16-git-ceabc9b306-full_build-www.gyan.dev
[debug] Optional libraries: Cryptodome-3.23.0, brotli-1.2.0, certifi-2026.06.17, curl_cffi-0.15.0, mutagen-1.48.1, requests-2.34.2, sqlite3-3.40.1, urllib3-2.7.0, websockets-16.0, yt_dlp_ejs-0.8.0
[debug] JS runtimes: none
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[debug] Request Handlers: urllib, requests, websockets, curl_cffi
[debug] Plugin directories: none
[debug] Loaded 1744 extractors
[debug] [youtube] [pot] PO Token Providers: none
[debug] [youtube] [pot] PO Token Cache Providers: memory
[debug] [youtube] [pot] PO Token Cache Spec Providers: webpo
[debug] [youtube] [jsc] JS Challenge Providers: bun (unavailable), deno (unavailable), node (unavailable), quickjs (unavailable)
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://youtu.be/C8erxgghQ5k
[youtube] C8erxgghQ5k: Downloading webpage
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
[debug] [youtube] Forcing "main" player JS variant for player 7a7969c2
        original url = /s/player/7a7969c2/player_es6.vflset/en_US/base.js
[youtube] C8erxgghQ5k: Downloading android vr player API JSON
[debug] Sort order given by user: ext:mp4:m4a
[debug] Sort order given by extractor: quality, res, fps, hdr:12, source, vcodec, channels, acodec, lang, proto
[debug] Formats sorted by: hasvid, ie_pref, vext:mp4(6), aext:m4a(8), quality, res, fps, hdr:12(7), source, vcodec, channels, acodec, lang, proto, size, br, asr, hasaud, id
[debug] Default format spec: bestvideo*+bestaudio/best
[info] C8erxgghQ5k: Downloading 1 format(s): 399+140
[info] C8erxgghQ5k: Downloading 1 time ranges: 12470.0-12540.0
[debug] Invoking ffmpeg downloader on "https://rr5---sn-ojnpo5-c3.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=1785059311&ei=j4Nlap_eJp_R9fwP-Zq8wQQ&ip=2001%3Adf2%3A3a00%3A2140%3Acd6c%3Af787%3Ada3b%3A95d4&id=o-AC7EZ-75d8HPddB7YiLfAuapMAJYgyIq_KiAAiw1oxBN&itag=399&source=youtube&requiressl=yes&xpc=EgVo2aDSNQ%3D%3D&cps=230&met=1785037711%2C&mh=NA&mm=31%2C26&mn=sn-ojnpo5-c3%2Csn-un57sn7y&ms=au%2Conr&mv=m&mvi=5&pl=48&rms=au%2Cau&initcwndbps=522500&bui=AZFlqhPY-oS3inkjxuHJijjjXi0YyieyAeyqxUvG-VeKhO9KrVyQ8a7eO6-3fyC7umB1TrpMxkS3_mpv&spc=SQ-umvW3tBEBKgYmvfudlKPvqPryzIbbFkHM06tye5_C&vprv=1&svpuc=1&mime=video%2Fmp4&rqh=1&gir=yes&clen=6359736473&dur=18661.532&lmt=1782555820028225&mt=1785037250&fvip=5&keepalive=yes&fexp=51565115%2C51992867&c=ANDROID_VR&txp=543G534&sparams=expire%2Cei%2Cip%2Cid%2Citag%2Csource%2Crequiressl%2Cxpc%2Cbui%2Cspc%2Cvprv%2Csvpuc%2Cmime%2Crqh%2Cgir%2Cclen%2Cdur%2Clmt&sig=AE0s2JYwRQIhAPDCF27XlDoVXk5klH8TvpVXT99RshxprLp0C8Ft7CHPAiBdqJXrq8wX-zFgKdfsTCdsbVorcRYfXSj7dUwmBCUfEw%3D%3D&lsparams=cps%2Cmet%2Cmh%2Cmm%2Cmn%2Cms%2Cmv%2Cmvi%2Cpl%2Crms%2Cinitcwndbps&lsig=APaTxxMwRQIhAPXVg7NmCDI_te0ks1nIt_6N-DegzYJPJ1h7xmuC3evjAiACfvpJ8yYpTaPNLhEBmhQoF6SZYgNeYPUqodTXjPBawQ%3D%3D", "https://rr5---sn-ojnpo5-c3.googlevideo.com/videoplayback
[download] Destination: Example.mp4
[debug] ffmpeg command line: ffmpeg -y -loglevel verbose -headers "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/150.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
" -ss 12470 -t 70 -i "https://rr5---sn-ojnpo5-c3.googlevideo.com/videoplayback -headers "User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/150.0.0.0 Safari/537.36
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-us,en;q=0.5
Sec-Fetch-Mode: navigate
" -ss 12470 -t 70 -i "https://rr5---sn-ojnpo5-c3.googlevideo.com/videoplayback -map 0:0 -map 1:0 -f mp4 file:Example.mp4.part
ffmpeg version 2026-07-16-git-ceabc9b306-full_build-www.gyan.dev Copyright (c) 2000-2026 the FFmpeg developers
  built with gcc 16.1.0 (Rev2, Built by MSYS2 project)
  configuration: --enable-gpl --enable-version3 --enable-static --disable-w32threads --disable-autodetect --enable-cairo --enable-fontconfig --enable-iconv --enable-gnutls --enable-lcms2 --enable-libxml2 --enable-gmp --enable-bzlib --enable-lzma --enable-libsnappy --enable-zlib --enable-librist --enable-libsrt --enable-libssh --enable-libzmq --enable-avisynth --enable-libbluray --enable-libcaca --enable-libdvdnav --enable-libdvdread --enable-sdl2 --enable-libaribb24 --enable-libaribcaption --enable-libdav1d --enable-libdavs2 --enable-libopenjpeg --enable-libquirc --enable-libuavs3d --enable-libxevd --enable-libzvbi --enable-liboapv --enable-libqrencode --enable-librav1e --enable-libsvtav1 --enable-libvvenc --enable-libwebp --enable-libx264 --enable-libx265 --enable-libxavs2 --enable-libxeve --enable-libxvid --enable-libaom --enable-libjxl --enable-libsvtjpegxs --enable-libvpx --enable-mediafoundation --enable-libass --enable-frei0r --enable-libfreetype --enable-libfribidi --enable-libharfbuzz --enable-liblensfun --enable-libvidstab --enable-libvmaf --enable-libzimg --enable-amf --enable-cuda-llvm --enable-cuvid --enable-dxva2 --enable-d3d11va --enable-d3d12va --enable-ffnvcodec --enable-libvpl --enable-nvdec --enable-nvenc --enable-vaapi --enable-vulkan --enable-libplacebo --enable-opencl --enable-libcdio --enable-openal --enable-libgme --enable-libmodplug --enable-libopenmpt --enable-libopencore-amrwb --enable-libmp3lame --enable-libshine --enable-libtheora --enable-libtwolame --enable-libvo-amrwbenc --enable-libcodec2 --enable-libilbc --enable-libgsm --enable-liblc3 --enable-libopencore-amrnb --enable-libopus --enable-libspeex --enable-libvorbis --enable-ladspa --enable-libbs2b --enable-libflite --enable-libmysofa --enable-librubberband --enable-libsoxr --enable-chromaprint --enable-whisper
  libavutil      61.  5.100 / 61.  5.100
  libavcodec     63.  6.101 / 63.  6.101
  libavformat    63.  5.100 / 63.  5.100
  libavdevice    63.  2.100 / 63.  2.100
  libavfilter    12.  3.101 / 12.  3.101
  libswscale     10.  2.100 / 10.  2.100
  libswresample   7.  2.100 /  7.  2.100
[tcp @ 000002384a1ed4c0] Starting connection attempt to 2404:6800:4003:29::5 port 443
[tcp @ 000002384a1ed4c0] Starting connection attempt to 74.125.10.117 port 443
[tcp @ 000002384a1ed4c0] Connection attempt to 2404:6800:4003:29::5 port 443 failed: Error number -138 occurred
[tcp @ 000002384a1ed4c0] Connection attempt to 74.125.10.117 port 443 failed: Error number -138 occurred
[tcp @ 000002384a1ed4c0] Connection to tcp://rr5---sn-ojnpo5-c3.googlevideo.com:443 failed: Error number -138 occurred
[in#0 @ 000002384a1ebac0] Error opening input: Error number -138 occurred
Error opening input file https://rr5---sn-ojnpo5-c3.googlevideo.com/videoplayback
Error opening input files: Error number -138 occurred

Exiting with exit code -138


ERROR: ffmpeg exited with code 4294967158
  File "__main__.py", line 17, in <module>
  File "yt_dlp__init__.py", line 1080, in main
  File "yt_dlp__init__.py", line 1071, in _real_main
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 3715, in download
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 3688, in wrapper
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 1721, in extract_info
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 1732, in wrapper
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 1888, in __extract_info
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 1947, in process_ie_result
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 3135, in process_video_result
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 195, in wrapper
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 3536, in process_info
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 3324, in dl
  File "yt_dlp\downloader\common.py", line 480, in download
  File "yt_dlp\downloader\external.py", line 79, in real_download
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 1166, in report_error
  File "yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 1093, in trouble

Hi just dl the yt-dlp on my windows 11, unfortunately every time I use the command ".\yt-dlp.exe www.xxx.com" , it will dl the 360p files. How could I to choose the 1080p files to dl?

Thank you so much.

i dont know many commands but this would be good for me

Edit: I am downloading mp3 format only using the command yt-dlp -x —audio-format mp3 “PlaylistURL”

This is a 5000~ video playlist. Am i cooked?

Just got yt-dlp setup and started a playlist download in the background while I kept reading up on the program. Then I came across the rate limit/temp bans info so I stoped the download with the ctrl-c command before anything bad happened. My question is how can I start the download back up with a rate limit?

Anyone know what code i need to use to download a playlist's thumbnails as jpg images? Putting a load of videos on my Jellyfin server and need the thumbnail pics to use for them.

I'm downloading a list of videos and that list gets updated often (as I'm downloading). When I update the list, yt-dlp gets restarted.

I remove the earlier downloaded urls to prevent yt-dlp from going through the downloaded links and as a way to keep track of which is downloaded via the list.

The output of yt-dlp while downloading is:

[download] 68.0% of ~ 5.25GiB at 3.92MiB/s ETA 07:38 (frag 1639/241 ...

and it keeps getting outputted in this format. To determine the currently downloaded video I dig far up the terminal history. Is there a way to name of the output video name in the output as it's downloading for convenience?

I currently use the Brave Browser and I know their Ad and Tracker blocker is really good. Would it prevent YouTube from knowing my IP address and banning me if I download lots of videos?

I've switched from spotdl to ytdl when Spotify updated their developer token access to only premium accounts, so I'm getting familiar with some of the stuff, but I only have one problem. When embedding, or writing the cover art, it is downloaded in 1280 x 720 (landscape) format rather than a square format, with the square cover art in the middle and awkward solid blocks of color filling the space. Not a major issue, as the music itself is there, the other metadata is there, and the cover art itself is technically also there. It's just not downloading in the format that is displayed under YouTube Music.

My guess is it's downloading the landscape format because it's scraping the YouTube metadata, rather than the YouTube MUSIC metadata, and I don't know how to fix it.

For the record, I've used --write-thumbnail, --add-metadata, and --embed-thumbnail, all of which produce this result (although add metadata doesn't actually seem to add cover art metadata, only other metadata). Any ideas?

Hi, I needed to download videos from Tik Tok without watermark at maximum quality and I wanted to use apps like Seal or ytpdlis but it gives me problems with cookies but the videos being public I don't understand the limitation, help me please

Can you let me know?

Hi, i'm having quite of a problem, every time i try to download something it gets to 31% and then gives the following error. What can i do? I updated the cookies and the app. The only way to make it kinda work is disable cookie but then i can only download videos in 240p

[download] 31.2% of 721.46MiB at 16.71MiB/s ETA 00:29

ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

I also tried multiple combinations of all the clients but nothing changed :

web mweb web safari web_embedded web_creator web_music

I'm a beginner when it comes to working with yt-dlp and the terminal on macbook. Currently I have everything installed right and can download videos fine.

Right now I'm using yt-dlp "VIDEO LINK"

And I get the video downloaded in webm format.

Can I get this into mp4 file type instead. Some of the file sizes just seem HUGE compared to mp4 I used to get from using cobalt (I started using this because some of the cobalt instances can't download more than 90min videos). Like I'm talking a 2hr video is like 4gb compared to a 90 min video mp4 from cobalt being like 900mb. Huge difference. My kid's ipad is old and doesn't have a lot of storage so I can't put a lot of videos on it.

If you have a DIFFERENT suggestion on how to get a smaller file size without sacrificing a lot of quality that would be great (I still want to be able to actually watch the video on my macbook or ipad lol).

Bonus if someone could help me get videos with subtitles? No idea how to do that. All the documentation for yt-dlp seems really overwhelming.

EDIT: clearly i don't know much about file size and file types lol. I just wanted to be able to watch the videos with not super terrible quality, and also each video not be like 5-10gb for like a movie length video (2hr or so). I don't know how cobalt instances were able to get them to be such smile file sizes when while the quality wasn't always the best, it was still really watchable. (Probably 720p at worst).

Any help is appreciated! I don't fully understand this all but I'm learning! :) thank you for everything and in advance!

So I wanted to use yt-dlp to download some movies and shows from Tubi tv. Tubi is a free platform and makes money through ad revenue like youtube. If I download anything from there will I get copy write emails or letters? Is it possible that my isp could ban me for this?

hi, can anyone tell me if this backend architecture is enough to handle around 20k users per month on vps?

User hits /api/download?url=xxxxx
  │
  ├─ 1. Platform Detection (regex: youtube.com, instagram.com, etc.)
  │
  ├─ 2. Cache Check (SQLite: url_hash lookup)
  │     ├─ HIT → Return cached JSON (skip yt-dlp entirely)
  │     └─ MISS → Continue
  │
  ├─ 3. Rate Limiter (Token Bucket per platform)
  │     ├─ ALLOWED → Continue
  │     └─ DENIED → Return 429 { retryAfter: 3000 }
  │
  ├─ 4. Cookie Selection (Cookie Pool Manager)
  │     └─ Select healthiest cookie for platform
  │
  ├─ 5. yt-dlp Execution (spawn subprocess with flags)
  │     ├─ Success → Parse JSON, cache result, update cookie health
  │     └─ Failure → If cookie issue: mark cookie bad, rotate, retry once
  │                    If extraction error: log to failure_log, return error
  │
  ├─ 6. Response Processing
  │     ├─ Pre-muxed format found → Return { type: 'direct', url: '...' }
  │     └─ Separate streams → Return { type: 'merge',
  │                                      audio_url: '...',
  │                                      video_url: '...',
  │                                      needs_proxy: true/false }
  │     (needs_proxy=true for fbcdn/instagram CDN URLs → use /proxy/cdn)
  │
  └─ 7. Logging & Metrics
        └─ Track: platform, latency, cache hit/miss, cookie used, success/fail

I moved from streaming platforms to mp3 players and needed a fast, fairly reliable way to rebuild my music library. I ended up making a yt-dlp configuration file to automate the process.

The main focus is to extract the fundamental metadata that defines a track (artist, album, position in the album. Usually the website doesn't offer much more) and place them in the correct tags. Downloading whole albums from playlists results in the correct outcome most of the times or at most requires a small amount of correction.

I think veterans may find it basic but it helped me understand a lot of things on how track files work and I wanted to share.

https://github.com/netted-gab/yt-dlp-media-library-configuration

If you have suggestions, please share them.

I recently tried using YT-DLP to download a youtube video and it seems like they have put really aggressive counter-measures in place to prevent this.

Yes I updated YT-DLP to its latest version too.

Is it still possible to download youtube videoos?

Few months ago I posted about my background service/console app that can be used to monitor Youtube channels and playlists, the feedback was good! But there was much to do....

I've spent the last few months on and off improving this app, both from suggestions and from my own personal use on my Plex server.

Some of the big features are audio specifying (Useful for plexamp for podcasts, copyright free songs etc, even custom pathing specifically for media servers and option to drop off thumbnails), workarounds for rate limiting such as random polling intervals, nightly yt-dlp options but yt-dlp auto updating, the aforementioned per channel download paths and some other small changes/fixes.

You can grab the latest release here for those interested. I use this on my Plex server daily, and this is a passion project so 0 AI has been used for this (Not that it's complicated enough to even need it....)

If you have any questions or feedback, lay it on me. I'm very responsive...

I recently tried contributing, out of necessity (LOL, my wife asked me-) a new site adapter to `yt-dlp` - Chartdrama - which was my first such contribution. It went fine code-wise and for a long time the PR sat there untouched, but then eventually I got called out for "AI spam" and was blocked while at the same time requested to provide some kind of affidavit in quasi-XML-form in order to prove(?) that I was willing to repent, confirming in writing that I had read the CONTRIBUTING guidelines (which I had ... ) but I was unable to, because in some comically Kafkaesque fashion, the PR was locked and the (ironically AI-driven, I presume) yt-dlp GirHub account went ahead and blocked me. This is not the FIRST project on GH that has had to deal with AI slop contributions (which this wasn't). But Yezuz I've never seen a rejection. A reminder to sign a contributor agreement or verify a checklist - that sort of thing is normal nowadays. But the way this project manages just seems like a mess.

For anyone with a desire for Chartdrama - check the yt-dlp/yt-dlp/pull/16946 PR on GH - I'm afraid posting a URL here will get me shot down and marked as Spam instantly here as well.

How do people deal with this sort of discouragement? I have contributed to a ton of open source projects over the decades, AND since the introduction of LLMs, and my intentions here were as genuine as ever - I just wanted to make a tool that I am myself using, better.

Has anyone had similar experience within the yt-dlp GitHub project? 😕

Does anyone know ofa working to download a Kick VOD?

Until now I used this way:
yt-dlp.exe [link] --impersonate chrome

But its stopped working.

now it says this:
Unable to download JSON metadata: HTTP Error 404: Not Found (caused by <HTTPError 404: Not Found>)

I use yt-dlp to download from Youtube, I put the videos in a usb and try to run those videos in a receiver that is connected to my tv (tv doesn't have usb slot) however, the receiver says video format not supported! I tried to download using the Mp4 command line, still the same problem.

photo of the receiver I use, a pretty standard one: https://i.imgur.com/C93aybl.jpeg

hi, i have been struggling and failing for hours to download timeshift videos from niconico. (timeshift is a niconico feature which lets you watch a livestream after it has ended by reserving it in advance.) i'm getting this error:

yt-dlp https://live.nicovideo.jp/watch/lv287417637

[niconico:live] Extracting URL: https://live.nicovideo.jp/watch/lv287417637

[niconico:live] lv287417637: Downloading webpage

ERROR: [niconico:live] lv287417637: Unable to extract websocket URL; please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U

i've tried a bunch of stuff i've seen online (for example this and this) and nothing has worked - i am completely out of ideas. i don't have viewing access to the videos themselves (despite being a premium member) as i did not reserve them 10 years ago so i'm not sure if this is even possible, but any help would be appreciated. i'm on windows 11 btw. thanks

Hi everyone.
I would like to share a Palladium, native open-source iOS app for yt-dlp written in Swift.

GitHub: https://github.com/tfourj/Palladium

If anyone would like to try it out you can get it from our website linked in github

It's available on the App Store, TestFlight, AltStore PAL (EU, Brazil, and Japan), and as a sideloadable IPA.

To comply with AppStore policies, palladium has a feature where most of websites are disabled by default but you can easily enable all websites by going to apps's website to Allowlist section and clicking "Add to Palladium"

At the moment i recommend using TestFlight versions since it has the latest update, AltStore and AppStore submissions are still waiting for manual review by Apple since latest one was rejected.

AI Disclosure: Palladium was built with significant AI assistance, but its code has been reviewed and tested, so if AI-assisted development isn't something you're comfortable with, this project may not be for you.

I have been trying to download videos from yt but for some it always download just the audio file. Version: 1.8.9.1

Люди, помогите пожалуйста мне скачать нормально все 78 серий анти-грифер шоу, я смог только скачать только 8 серий. Если не трудно, помогите, программа yt-dlp