12

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
4
  • 1
    did you try the updated version. Try running sudo youtube-dl -U to update it
    – Stormvirux
    Jul 11, 2014 at 11:53
  • yes i have tried the updated version still doesn't work Jul 11, 2014 at 12:30
  • 1
    I suggest you to install DownloadHelper in firefox. It is fast and effective. CLI takes a long time! Sep 11, 2014 at 12:46
  • 1
    Possible duplicate of Cannot update youtube-dl Jan 15, 2016 at 2:58

8 Answers 8

15

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 It seems this version is outdated.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
1
11

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.

2
  • This is how youtube-dl should always be downloaded, in my opinion
    – geoffmcc
    Jan 1, 2015 at 14:41
  • confirm: the apt-get version of youtube-dl does not work, you have to download youtube-dl from its website, where you will find updated instructions to download the latest version - this post was copied from there but has an old download link. Note that you can also download it without sudo, like this mkdir youtubedl; cd youtubedl; wget 'wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2016.03.14/youtube-dl -O youtube-dl' -O youtube-dl; ./youtube-dl (use the latest download url as indicated in the youtube-dl webpage
    – zipizap
    Mar 16, 2016 at 9:25
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).

2

Try to clear youtube-dl cache:

youtube-dl --rm-cache-dir

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

0
1

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

sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl

This fixes the problem all right.

0

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/

1
  • -1 How is the installation of an upstream version of avconv from source going to alleviate a networking issue of youtube-dl? O.o Jan 15, 2016 at 2:57
0

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.

0

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

1
  • You could also just do apt-get install --reinstall youtube-dl to achieve the same, I think...
    – Byte Commander
    Feb 17, 2016 at 9:01

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