Youtube-dl not working

Question

I get the following error when I try to download video using youtube-dl.

WARNING: Warning: Falling back to static signature algorithm
ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

Answer 1

Have you installed via apt-get? It seems this version is outdated. This was happening to me:

$ sudo youtube-dl -U
It looks like you installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball. Please use that to update.

You can install it from official sources: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html

Using curl:

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

If you do not have curl, you can alternatively use wget:

sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

You can also use pip:

sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl

You can also use Homebrew:

brew install youtube-dl

Answer 2

The solutions above didn't work for me. I used the following commands from the official youtube-dl website.

http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html

Use wget:

sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2014.09.25/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

This fixed it for me.

Answer 3

Those facing new problems with the youtube-dl with this error "Warning: Falling back to static signature algorithm" should first install python-pip (if they have not already installed it, of course) with

sudo apt-get install python-pip

and then, to fix the error, use

sudo pip install youtube-dl --upgrade

This is what worked for me this morning (as at the time of posting this answer).

Answer 4

Try to clear youtube-dl cache:

youtube-dl --rm-cache-dir

Source: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/6610:

Answer 5

Install pip-python if you haven't already, then type :

sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl

This fixes the problem all right.

Answer 6

This is old, but the subject is still of actuality. I had some issues with youtube-dl and ytdl recently. The version obtained via snap install youtube-dl and the one obtained via pip install youtube-dl both failed with the message "Unable to extract uploader id". The one obtained via pip install ytdl failed with the message "youtube-dl not found". Yet, as of December 2024, Youtube-dl is still well maintained and available as a git repository in https://github.com/ytdl-org/ytdl-nightly and https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl. Both worked for me. When I tried to directly download youtube-dl from https://yt-dl.org/ as suggested in their readme.md file, it failed because the site did not have a valid ssl certificate. (It is most likely a temporary issue.) However, in both cases, having already installed, python, GNU make and zip, I could install youtube-dl simply by executing make and sudo make install in the root of the repository.

Answer 7

Following fixed the issue. It is now working beautifully.

$ sudo apt-get install yasm
$ git clone git://git.libav.org/libav.git
$ cd libav
$ ./configure
$ make
$ sudo make install

Source: http://www.tecmint.com/record-ubuntu-desktop-screen-using-avconv/

Answer 8

I downloaded youtube-dl from https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2014.09.25/. I then did a chmod 777 youtube-dl, and ran the command. It asked me to upgrade via ./youtube-dl -U which upgraded me to the version 2015.12.13. I ran ./youtube-dl with the URL again and the problem had been solved.

Trying a pip upgrade on the default pip installation of youtube-dl did not do the upgrade or solve the problem, indicating that the pypi version might be outdated on bug fixes.

Answer 9

I tried this and everything is working good now :

apt-get remove youtube-dl
apt-get update
apt-get install youtube-dl

Now it's work again, since those lines will re-installing the latest youtube-dl from server