[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed

[ab396356]

Using Windows 7 SP1 64-bit, youtube-dl 2018.07.10.

I cannot download YouTube videos because youtube-dl fails to verify certificates. Yes, I know about the --no-check-certificate workaround but that's not a proper solution (and besides, it's annoying to type).

Unless I'm shown otherwise I consider this to be a bug in youtube-dl and not a bug in my Windows installation. The error messages at the very least could be improved because they're gibberish. For example I would like to know exactly which certificate fails to validate, if it even makes sense to ask that question. If the issue is that my certificates were somehow corrupted or are outdated, how come any of the installed browsers can connect to https:// YouTube without problems, including Internet Explorer?

It is the above paragraph why I am posting what is essentially a duplicate bug report that will probably be swiftly closed and remain unsolved. My problem is that youtube-dl, by failing to verify certificates, hints that my system is insecure. Which is almost certainly not the case.

I would like to ask the developers to improve the error message for certificate validation failure. If this problem is truly not a bug in youtube-dl itself (even though youtube-dl alone is affected) then the user must be helped to fix the configuration problem in Windows by being given a meaningful, informative error message. Thank you.

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtC4RAFoiY8 2> normal.txt 1>&2

[youtube] YtC4RAFoiY8: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to download webpage: <urlopen error [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:600)> (caused by URLError(SSLError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:600)'),))

youtube-dl -v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtC4RAFoiY8 2> verbose.txt 1>&2

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YtC4RAFoiY8']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs mbcs, out cp1252, pref cp1252
[debug] youtube-dl version 2018.07.10
[debug] Python version 3.4.4 (CPython) - Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 4.0, ffprobe 4.0
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] YtC4RAFoiY8: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to download webpage: <urlopen error [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:600)> (caused by URLError(SSLError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed (_ssl.c:600)'),))
  File "C:\Users\dst\AppData\Roaming\Build archive\youtube-dl\rg3\tmp4etivjk5\build\youtube_dl\extractor\common.py", line 599, in _request_webpage
  File "C:\Users\dst\AppData\Roaming\Build archive\youtube-dl\rg3\tmp4etivjk5\build\youtube_dl\YoutubeDL.py", line 2211, in urlopen
  File "C:\Python\Python34\lib\urllib\request.py", line 464, in open
  File "C:\Python\Python34\lib\urllib\request.py", line 482, in _open
  File "C:\Python\Python34\lib\urllib\request.py", line 442, in _call_chain
  File "C:\Users\dst\AppData\Roaming\Build archive\youtube-dl\rg3\tmp4etivjk5\build\youtube_dl\utils.py", line 1102, in https_open
  File "C:\Python\Python34\lib\urllib\request.py", line 1185, in do_open