sometimes youtube believes I’m a bot and won’t allow downloading stuff from them with yt-dlp 2026.07.04 on debian 13.6.
I could torify the whole computer, so next time I open a terminal and execute yt-dlp it uses tor by default. Sadly, I don’t know how to do that.
Another way would be to torify only yt-dlp, but neither do I know how to do that.
Changing the mac address and hostname did nothing.
Can you help?
oh hey, I had that issue recently where YouTube thought I was a bot and yt-dlp gave me an error “sign in to confirm you’re not a bot”. This issue is actually mentioned on the yt-dlp FAQ and they said to use a proof of origin token provider (POT provider). After setting up the recommended one made by Brainicism, I only had to run it once, open a video with the POT provider in the background and since then YouTube doesn’t believe I’m a bot anymore. Now yt-dlp works without using the POT provider again.
Not sure for how long, sometimes YouTube still denies me videos on the first try but usually it works after a re-try.
PS.: On the FAQ it is also mentioned to not use your YouTube account token with yt-dlp, else YouTube might associate your account with a bot and ban it.
as to “how” it’s as simple as
torify yt-dlp https://youtu.be/etc. I don’t think it’ll help, though. maybe try some alternative frontend like Freetube that allows you to download videos interactively.If you use yt-dlp through tor it will be worse: 403 almost every request. I don’t know if youtube treats tor exit nodes different or it’s because other people also uses that address and generates a strange behavior which youtube flags.
What’s works best for me is using my own residential ip and waiting like an hour between downloads. Throttling doesn’t seem to help.
Regarding how to torify, you can install tor with apt and it will act like a proxy. Then you can use yt-dlp proxy settings
MAC is for your local network.
Hostname is not relevant because the endpoints you’re connecting to are not doing reverse lookups.
Your Public IP from your ISP is all they see. They’ve also blocked VPN endpoint IP address space.
They aren’t tracking you through software on your machine, just the global address space. Best you can do is see if your ISP has IP6 space you can be attached to, because they don’t have a good way to block that yet.
It would be more accurate to say they try and block the vpn providers and Tor exit nodes. In practice, they do have ~95% of Tor exit nodes blacklisted but major vpn providers it’s closer to 40%. Vpn providers go through a lot of effort to hide their exit traffic and it’s pretty simple to use a provider that has a reasonably robust cli to just rotate nodes until you find one that works
Connect
Test known-good video using yt-dlp
If fail, use vpn cli to connect to a new node
Reeat until success
If your provider let’s you connect to specific nodes you can even store the last-known-good and use it on first connect until it gets blacklisted, extending uptime considerably
Just post a picture of your beard and official Autism Certificate FFS.
Jesus fuck.
I don’t understand, is suggesting someone write a 7 line bash script in a Linux forum post about using a cli downloader, unreasonable?
I reset my ip in the router interface if they do that and that resolves it
Start a tor daemon with SOCKS5 proxy:
$ tor socksport 9050Then run yt-dlp through it:
$ yt-dlp --proxy socks5://127.0.0.1:9050 <your arguments>I’ve noticed that *not using* youtube for a while gets you ublocked, too. Which is only good, if you think about it. Most often (even if not always), your days will get a bit healthier, and the lifting of the block is only a bonus when you really need that rare video, too.
I haven’t found other solutions or tricks; nor have I tried after I’ve realised that this one works. I take it as a “hint” from google, to get away from the screen (YT) for a few days.
