How to download private videos from YouTube with youtube-dl

Feb 02, 2020 Youtube flaws

youtube-dl is a wonderful tool for downloading videos so they can be watched offline. Most of the time I only want to store a publicly accessible video. Sometimes I want to access a video that is only accessible when I am logged into my YouTube account. To do this was more challenging than I thought it would be, partly because youtube-dl is working through some issues. The specific issues I ran into dealt with two factor authentication and reading cookie formats. Summary

Here is what eventually worked for me.

Install EditThisCookie plugin for Chrome (Chromium in my case)
Set the cookie export format to Netscape HTTP Cookie File
Log into YouTube
Export the cookies into a file for the domains https://youtube.com, https://accounts.google.com and https://www.google.com
Make sure the cookies are properly formatted with the curl tool
Download your video using the --cookies flag

Why cookies?

I had to use cookies because I couldn’t get the –username flag to work due to an issue with 2FA in youtube-dl. If 2FA authentication is not turned on then maybe –username will work. Because of this I needed to export my cookies with EditThisCookie plugin. I couldn’t find a plugin for my version of Firefox (version 60.0.2). EditThisCookie

The first issue I had with EditThisCookie is it exported in JSON format, but youtube-dl only takes Netscape format. In EditThisCookie the format can be changed to Netscape HTTP Cookie File. YouTube cookies

In order to get the cookies you need to first log into YouTube. You could then inspect the page and see all the cookies loaded. If you really wanted to you could then manually copy over all of the cookies manually into a cookies file. I don’t know how to do this so that the format is right, that is why I am using EditThisCookie and curl. However, you will notice that YouTube uses cookies from different domains which are needed for youtube-dl to work. Unfortunatly, EditThisCookie will not download all the cookies from several domains for a web page. You will need to manually export the cookies into a file for each of the domains https://youtube.com, https://acounts.google.com and https://www.google.com. You should finally get a file that looks something like this:

http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html

This file was generated by EditThisCookie

.youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.181169 APISID xxxxxxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1529675666.4735 GPS 1 .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.181027 HSID xxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.956381 LOGIN_INFO xxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1550712605.073926 PREF xxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / TRUE 1592746624.181263 SAPISID xxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.180932 SID xxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / TRUE 1592746624.181105 SSID xxxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 1531743283.040211 VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE xxxxx .youtube.com FALSE / FALSE 0 YSC xxxxx

http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html

This file was generated by EditThisCookie

.google.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.009486 APISID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.009335 HSID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1545488676.021505 NID xxxxxx .google.com FALSE / TRUE 1592746624.009559 SAPISID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.009103 SID xxxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1537454702.826293 SIDCC xxxxxx .google.com FALSE / TRUE 1592746624.009422 SSID xxxxxx accounts.google.com TRUE / TRUE 1592746624.009627 xxxxx accounts.google.com TRUE / TRUE 1592746624.106059 GAPS xxxxx accounts.google.com TRUE / TRUE 1592746624.009204 LSID xxxxx accounts.google.com TRUE / TRUE 1801458753.849165 SMSV xxxxxx

http://curl.haxx.se/rfc/cookie_spec.html

This file was generated by EditThisCookie

.google.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.009486 APISID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.009335 HSID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1545488676.021505 NID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / TRUE 1592746624.009559 SAPISID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1592746624.009103 SID xxxxx .google.com FALSE / FALSE 1537454702.826293 SIDCC xxxxxx .google.com FALSE / TRUE 1592746624.009422 SSID xxxxxx

youtube-dl cookie parser

There is still more work to be done on the cookies file in order for it to work with youtube-dl. Because youtube-dl cannot parse the format exported from EditThisCookie, the cookie file needs to be run through curl like this:

curl -b cookiefile.txt –cookie-jar newcookiefile.txt ‘https://youtube.com’

That will create a new newcookiefile.txt which can be used with youtube-dl. Finally

youtube-dl can now be used to download the private videos by using the –cookies flag like so:

youtube-dl –cookies=newcookiefile.txt https://youtu.be/Q-xxxx-xxxx

Yay! 🍪