Cookie option

[vanilla38]

Hello, since i still did not understand on what this option consists and i cant find any good description, can anyone explain me what it does and how to use it since i heard about a necessary user agent option. Thanks.

[phihag]

For normal use (i.e. downloading videos), you don't need either of the --cookies FILE (where FILE is the file to read cookies from and dump the cookie jar in) or --user-agent options. Both are only needed for advanced use (external downloaders or debugging).

[yasoob]

I am also getting curious where EXACTLY can the --cookies flag be used. How is it helpful with external Downloaders ? Just want a little elaboration.

[phihag]

Some video services (youtube in some cases, it depends) only allow downloads from the final URL if it can be associated with the extractor. Therefore, they set cookies during extraction/player setup, and throw out an error when somebody tries to download without those exact cookies.

If that's the case, the external downloader needs to supply the same cookies to the server. For example, if you want to download using wget, you could execute

URL=youtube-dl --get-url --cookies cookiefile.tmp http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WX6s-9hv800
wget --load-cookies cookiefile.tmp $URL

But as I wrote above, that's really an inferior way to embed a downloader, since it's error-prone (the cookie file will be overwritten if you run this command multiple times in parallel, for example) and relies on an external script. For instance, can you spot the two mistakes in the wget invocation above? It's way easier and more reliable to just include necessary features into youtube-dl itself.

[vanilla38]

Thanks for these explanations.