Updating youtube-dl fails, claims success, odd result

[grauerkoala]

I have installed youtube-dl using apt-get on Debian Wheezy:
$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

The version is rather old (2012.02.27), so i decided to update it:

$ sudo youtube-dl --update
Updating to latest version...
Updated youtube-dl. Restart youtube-dl to use the new version.

Though it appears to have been a success, the result is this:

$ youtube-dl --version
/usr/bin/youtube-dl: line 1: Not: command not found

What's that?, I wondered. Turns out, the contents of /usr/bin/youtube-dl have been rendered rather useless during the update:

$ cat /usr/bin/youtube-dl
Not Found

I used to have a far more recent version of youtube-dl than that since I had updated it a few, well, months back (sadly I did not take note of what it actually was), so I'm fairly confident that this error exists in later versions than 2012.02.27.

[phihag]

Thank you for the report. I am sorry for the fault; we did not expect anyone to run versions of youtube-dl that have been broken since 2012.

Use the following commands to update:

sudo rm /usr/bin/youtube-dl  # or apt-get remove -y youtube-dl
sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
hash -r

[grauerkoala]

(Sorry for the late reply)
I used these commands and as expected, it works fine. I was simply surprised by the fact that the latest package (unless I'm missing something) in the repos of Debian Wheezy -- which is currently considered "stable" -- is able to fail this badly at performing such an important feature.

While this is probably a matter of keeping the package up to date (though I'm familiar neither with the degree in which the maintainers are affiliated with the youtube-dl project nor with the policies that Debian has put in place regarding that), I figured, judging from what I had observed, that maybe a URL had changed that used to provide the latest version of youtube-dl, in which case this could have been considered as a suggestion on how to fix this rather bad behaviour.

So please don't take this as an offense. I like youtube-dl and I'd like to make sure that people that are new to it aren't going to be scared away by it breaking from trying to update it.

[rajvanshipradeep15]

Hello Phihag,

I have done the same as you have suggested but I get this error every time when I try to download,

youtube-dl http://youtu.be/Ds0qIpeEn3o
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] Ds0qIpeEn3o: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] Ds0qIpeEn3o: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] Ds0qIpeEn3o: Extracting video information
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 4645, in
main()
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 4636, in main
_real_main()
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 4620, in _real_main
retcode = fd.download(all_urls)
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 869, in download
ie.extract(url)
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 1135, in extract
return self._real_extract(url)
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 1406, in _real_extract
url_map = dict((ud['itag'][0], ud['url'][0] + '&signature=' + ud['sig'][0]) for ud in url_data)
File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 1406, in
url_map = dict((ud['itag'][0], ud['url'][0] + '&signature=' + ud['sig'][0]) for ud in url_data)
KeyError: 'sig'

Please guide me to fix this error.

[phihag]

@rajvanshipradeep15 Your problem is completely unrelated to this one. Please open a new issue. Do not forget to consult our FAQ and our bug reporting guidelines before opening the issue.

[MrRKernelPanic]

Thank you so much, came across this fix when trying to run youtube-dl on a Raspberry Pi 2, worked like a charm and fixed the inability to download Vevo videos! Keep up the excellent work. :)

[xDinomode]

@phihag Just thought I'd let you know that I attempted to install following these instructions on the official website and had the same problem (for linux fedora 23). But following your instructions made it work.

[zick53]

Latest youtube-dl
Error on OS X 10.11.5:
/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl: line 1: 302: command not found

[yan12125]

@zick53 Remove the existing /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl and re-download it. If you're using curl, an additional -L is necessary for the latest version. See https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl#installation