HTTP Basic Authentication does not work on http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~stamp/infosec/lectures/

[agyild]

Checklist

• I'm reporting a broken site support issue
• I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2019.07.14
• I've checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
• I've checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar bug reports including closed ones
• I've read bugs section in FAQ

Verbose log

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: ['--geo-bypass']
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v', '-F', '-u', 'PRIVATE', '-p', 'PRIVATE', 'http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~stamp/infosec/lectures/CS166_Spr18/CS166_4_3_18.mp4']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs utf-8, out cp1252, pref cp1252
[debug] youtube-dl version 2019.07.12
[debug] Python version 3.7.3 (CPython) - Windows-10-10.0.18362-SP0
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg N-93482-g9dece050ef
[debug] Proxy map: {}
WARNING: Could not send HEAD request to http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~stamp/infosec/lectures/CS166_Spr18/CS166_4_3_18.mp4: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized
ERROR: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 401: Unauthorized (caused by <HTTPError 401: 'Unauthorized'>); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\site-packages\youtube_dl\extractor\common.py", line 627, in _request_webpage
    return self._downloader.urlopen(url_or_request)
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\site-packages\youtube_dl\YoutubeDL.py", line 2227, in urlopen
    return self._opener.open(req, timeout=self._socket_timeout)
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\urllib\request.py", line 531, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\urllib\request.py", line 641, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\urllib\request.py", line 569, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\urllib\request.py", line 503, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "c:\program files\python37\lib\urllib\request.py", line 649, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)

[generic] CS166_4_3_18: Requesting header
[generic] CS166_4_3_18: Downloading webpage

Description

The following command does not work as expected:

youtube-dl -v -F -u infosec -p infosec http://www.cs.sjsu.edu/~stamp/infosec/lectures/CS166_Spr18/CS166_4_3_18.mp4

I have also tried authenticating with .netrc file, passing username and password in the URL request (e.g. http://username:password@example.com). The results are the same. The directory and the videos open fine in a browser.

[dstftw]

It's not supposed to. You must pass correct Authorization header.

[agyild]

OK, solved it by passing the Authorization header with --add-header option. (e.g. --add-header=Authorization:"Basic dXNlcm5hbWU6cGFzc3dvcmQ="
Also since it was actually for streaming with mpv, I have just discovered mpv has native support for streaming HTTP Basic authorized content via ffmpeg. One just has to request it directly with mpv, e.g:

mpv https://username:password@example.com/example.mp4