Ask Ubuntu is a question and answer site for Ubuntu users and developers. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
I am using youtube-dl to download some videos from youtube. But when I write:
youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rn_YodiJO6k
I get:
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] rn_YodiJO6k: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] rn_YodiJO6k: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] rn_YodiJO6k: Extracting video information
ERROR: unable to download video
What am I doing wrong?
Same question was asked on unix.stackexchange.com.
Youtube changed something to make it incompatible with youtube-dl, it's been fixed in the latest version. Use the following to update youtube-dl until the package system gets the updated version:
sudo youtube-dl -U
As noted by sup in the comments youtube-dl is patched in Ubuntu to disable the --update option because of security concerns (the bugreport is here). It is also argued in the bugreport that youtube-dl is a moving target, so the version in the repositories is often out of date. This makes easy upgrade a necessity.
Easy upgrade is still possible with e.g. pip. Install like this (you may want to uninstall old versions of youtube-dl first):
sudo pip install youtube_dl
Upgrading can now be done with:
sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl
As documented on the youtube-dl download page. Note that similar security concerns are attached to this method as well.
sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2013.11.07/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl (info from here: rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html )
For me the following lines worked:
sudo apt-get remove -y youtube-dl
wget -O - https://yt-dl.org/latest/youtube-dl | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl > /dev/null
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
hash -r
You have to put double quotes (") before and after the URL of the video to make it work.
I don't think it's a bug.
For example:
youtube-dl "<video-URL>"
