HTTP Error 404 on Youtube

[IceCloud76]

Checklist

• I'm reporting a broken site support issue
• I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2020.09.20
• 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: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: [u'--verbose', u'https://www.youtube.com/watch\\?v\\=tVZyjLSfETE']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs UTF-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2020.09.20
[debug] Python version 2.7.18rc1 (CPython) - Linux-5.4.0-47-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-20.04-focal
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 4.2.4, ffprobe 4.2.4, phantomjs 5, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[generic] watch\?v\=tVZyjLSfETE: Requesting header
WARNING: Could not send HEAD request to https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=tVZyjLSfETE: HTTP Error 404: Not Found
[generic] watch\?v\=tVZyjLSfETE: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 404: Not Found (caused by HTTPError()); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 632, in _request_webpage
    return self._downloader.urlopen(url_or_request)
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 2238, in urlopen
    return self._opener.open(req, timeout=self._socket_timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 435, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 548, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 473, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 407, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 556, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)

Description

I tried to download a video from Digital Foundry and it didn't work, as I was getting 404 errors each time. I also tried a few other videos with youtube-dl but they did not work as well. The same videos played fine in Firefox.

[dstftw]

Invalid URL escaping.