Frequently Asked Questions

Questions

The program has stopped working / I want to suggest a feature.
Can you please put the -b option back?
I get HTTP error 402 Payment Required when trying to download a video. What's this?
I have downloaded a video but how can I play it?
The links provided by youtube-dl -g are not working anymore
ERROR: no fmt_url_map or conn information found in video info
ERROR: unable to download video
SyntaxError:Non-ASCII character

The program has stopped working / I want to suggest a feature.

Please report the problem in the issuetracker. Your bug report should include:

Your exact command line, like youtube-dl -t "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHlDtZ6Oc3s&feature=channel_video_title"
The output of youtube-dl --version. If you have made any changes, please provide it. In many cases, simply updating (with youtube-dl --update) fixes the problem.
The output of python --version. We support Python 2.6+, and some parts are known to work with Python 2.5 or even 2.4. Python 3 support is planned.
The name and version of your Operating System ("Ubuntu 11.04 x64" or "Windows 7 x64" is usually enough).

If you're suggesting a feature, any details can help:

If it's an option: How would you call it? What should the help text be?
If it's support for a new site: Mention an example video URL. If you can describe the download process, that's a huge plus. But don't worry if you can't - we love a good challenge ;).
For programmers: Providing code that implements the change will speed up the integration process. Fork youtube-dl on github, and send us a pull request.

Can you please put the -b option back?

Most people asking this question are not aware that youtube-dl now defaults to downloading the highest available quality as reported by YouTube, which will be 1080p or 720p in some cases, so you no longer need the -b option. For some specific videos, maybe YouTube does not report them to be available in a specific high quality format you're interested in. In that case, simply request it with the -f option and youtube-dl will try to download it.

I get HTTP error `402 Payment Required` when trying to download a video. What's this?

Apparently YouTube requires you to pass a CAPTCHA test if you download too much. At this moment, there is no plan to solve this issue, as youtube-dl is a command line program that is many times used without X and in an unattended fashion, so there's no easy way of solving this, in my humble opinion. I have no plans to solve it at this moment, but let me know your ideas and code if you come up with something.

I have downloaded a video but how can I play it?

If you used youtube-dl to download a video and it wrote the video file to your hard drive, finishing with a completion message of 100%, the video is downloaded, so youtube-dl has finished its job and usually it's not to blame for problems that happen later. Not every video player supports FLV or MP4 files and every codec out there needed to play YouTube videos. In Linux, for example, I am generally pleased with MPlayer. In Windows, I tend to use VLC. Those usually work flawlessly.

The links provided by youtube-dl -g are not working anymore

Due to changes in YouTube, youtube-dl is now forced to provide the final video URL directly instead of the ones it used to provide, which were based on the "get_video" resource. The new URLs are real and work too, but they need to be used in combination with the --cookies option to be useful for external applications. Issue 41 in the issue tracker contains a bit more information about the problem.

ERROR: no fmt_url_map or conn information found in video info

youtube has switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. You can update youtube-dl with sudo youtube-dl --update (or python youtube-dl --update).

ERROR: unable to download video

youtube requires an additional signature since September 2012 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. You can update youtube-dl with sudo youtube-dl --update (or python youtube-dl --update).

SyntaxError:Non-ASCII character

The error File "youtube-dl", line 2 SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x93' ... means you're using an outdated version of Python. Please update to Python 2.6 or 2.7.

To run youtube-dl under Python 2.5, you'll have to manually check it out and run it like this: git clone git://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl.git cd youtube-dl python -m youtube-dl --help Please note that Python 2.5 is not supported anymore.