sometimes youtube believes I’m a bot and won’t allow downloading stuff from them with yt-dlp 2026.07.04 on debian 13.6.

I could torify the whole computer, so next time I open a terminal and execute yt-dlp it uses tor by default. Sadly, I don’t know how to do that.

Another way would be to torify only yt-dlp, but neither do I know how to do that.

Changing the mac address and hostname did nothing.

Can you help?

  • pp99@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    If you use yt-dlp through tor it will be worse: 403 almost every request. I don’t know if youtube treats tor exit nodes different or it’s because other people also uses that address and generates a strange behavior which youtube flags.

    What’s works best for me is using my own residential ip and waiting like an hour between downloads. Throttling doesn’t seem to help.

    Regarding how to torify, you can install tor with apt and it will act like a proxy. Then you can use yt-dlp proxy settings