Cookies

Cookies

YouTube increasingly answers with "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot", and private or age-gated playlists need an account either way. Both are solved by giving yt-dlp your session cookies.

From your browser

The safer option where nothing is written to disk.

ytmp3 "<url>" --cookies-from-browser firefox

Accepts firefox, chrome, chromium, brave, edge, opera, safari, vivaldi. Close the browser first: Chromium-based browsers lock their cookie database while running.

From a file

Export your cookies in Netscape format with a browser extension, then:

ytmp3 "<url>" --cookies cookies.txt

Cookies expire

YouTube rotates session cookies, and an export goes stale after a while, often within days. When downloads that used to work start failing the bot check again, export again.