-g option for YouTube is not working anymore

[tom87]

Since the change on YouTube on 9-12-2010 the returned download url doesn't work.
I get a HTML "Forbidden"

[rg3]

The option IS working and returning the video URL that YouTube is providing (notice that get_video is now a 404). However, if you want to use it to download the video, you may have to combine it with the --cookies option.

[rg3]

I just wanted to share the bourne shell function that I use to have a "yt" command available to watch videos while not using the web browser. It looks like this:

yt () 
{ 
    cookiefile="/tmp/cookies-$( date +%s.%N ).txt";
    url=$( youtube-dl --cookies $cookiefile -g "$@" );
    mplayer -cookies -cookies-file $cookiefile $url;
    rm -f $cookiefile
}

Then, I can use something like:

yt 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lm-Vnx58UYo'

And watch the video using mplayer.