Unable to download video from youtube

[shirishag75]

Hi all,
This is my youtube-dl version :-

 $ youtube-dl --version
    2013.10.23

This is the video I was trying to download, in fact many episodes of Crime Patrol show the following :-

 $ youtube-dl -F yZIXLfi8CZQ
   [youtube] Setting language
   [youtube] yZIXLfi8CZQ: Downloading video webpage
   [youtube] yZIXLfi8CZQ: Downloading video info webpage
   [youtube] Confirming age
   ERROR: YouTube said: This video contains content from Multi Screen Media, who has blocked it from display on this website.<br/><u><a href='http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yZIXLfi8CZQ&feature=player_embedded' target='_blank'>Watch on YouTube</a></u>

Looking forward to know how to do it right if there is a way ?

[bluesangel]

Did you try to simulate a web browser ?
with 2013.11.15 :
youtube-dl --user-agent 'Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8J2 Safari/6533.18.5' -F yZIXLfi8CZQ
gives
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] yZIXLfi8CZQ: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] yZIXLfi8CZQ: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] yZIXLfi8CZQ: Extracting video information
WARNING: unable to extract uploader nickname
Available formats:
18 : mp4 [360x640]
43 : webm [360x640]
5 : flv [240x400]
36 : 3gp [240x320]
17 : 3gp [144x176]
135 : mp4 [480p](DASH Video)
134 : mp4 [360p](DASH Video)
133 : mp4 [240p](DASH Video)
160 : mp4 [192p](DASH Video)
141 : m4a [256k](DASH Audio)
140 : m4a [128k](DASH Audio)
139 : m4a [48k](DASH Audio)
I guess you just miss --user-agent option :)

[jaimeMF]

@bluesangel the option for setting the user agent should not be needed for downloading videos. You can see the default user agent by running youtube-dl --dump-user-agent (currently it's Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0 (Chrome)), so I guess that on mobile browsers they don't block the content.

[shirishag75]

For some reason the first one worked exactly liked bluesangel shared.

If I try the normal way the same thing as before happens.

So basically to get around it I have to simulate the apple browser.

Is there a way to fix the user-agent as in changing the user-agent simulation permanently ?

[phihag]

Changing the user-agent just exploits a bug of YouTube. We should request the correct URL in the first place.

[phihag]

This has been fixed in youtube-dl 2013.11.18. I also stuck in the iPhone UA for good measure. Type sudo youtube-dl -U to update.