Help Miscellaneous

Authenticated download

When you are getting an error, where Youtube asks you to sign in to confirm your age or that you are not a bot, passing cookies from the browser may help.

Cookies from Browser

Simplest way to pass cookies is to use option Tools Options Page analysis yt-dlp Cookies from browser (it is shortcut for yt-dlp option --cookies-from-browser).

Select your browser there and ensure you are logged in on Youtube in the browser.

When having multiple profiles in the browser, will be chosen the most recently used one. Or you can specify profile explicitly by selecting Custom in this option and entering it in form <browser>:<profile>, for example, "Firefox:my_home_profile".

Elaborating further, you can create dedicated profile just for the use in downloader, maybe even with a different throwaway account. Example for Firefox can be found in this comment.

Cookies File

Alternatively you can export cookies from the browser to a file and specify this file using option Tools Options Page analysis yt-dlp Cookies (it is shortcut for yt-dlp option --cookies).

Possible ways to export:

• via browser extension. Recommended extensions are mentioned here: How do I pass cookies to yt-dlp?
• via UserScript, for example, the one kindly provided in this comment.

To make cookies last longer you may also try to prevent cookies rotation as described here: Exporting YouTube cookies.

Help Miscellaneous Authenticated download