<li>Your exact command line, like <codestyle="white-space: pre;">youtube-dl -t "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHlDtZ6Oc3s&feature=channel_video_title"</code></li>
<li>The output of <code>youtube-dl --version</code>. If you have made any changes, please provide it. In many cases, simply updating (with <codestyle="white-space: pre;">youtube-dl --update</code>) fixes the problem.</li>
<li>The output of <code>python --version</code>. We support Python 2.5+, and most parts are known to work with Python 2.4. Python 3 support is planned.</li>
<li>The name and version of your Operating System ("Ubuntu 11.04 x64" or "Windows 7 x64" is usually enough).</li>
<li>If it's support for a new site: Mention an example video URL. If you can describe the download process, that's a huge plus. But don't worry if you can't - we love a good challenge ;).</li>
<li>For programmers: Providing code that implements the change will speed up the integration process. <ahref="https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/fork">Fork youtube-dl</a> on github, and <ahref="http://help.github.com/send-pull-requests/">send us a pull request</a>.</li>
<p>Most people asking this question are not aware that youtube-dl now defaults to downloading the highest available quality as reported by YouTube, which will be 1080p or 720p in some cases, so you no longer need the -b option. For some specific videos, maybe YouTube does not report them to be available in a specific high quality format you're interested in. In that case, simply request it with the -f option and youtube-dl will try to download it.</p>
<p>Apparently YouTube requires you to pass a CAPTCHA test if you download too much. At this moment, there is no plan to solve this issue, as youtube-dl is a command line program that is many times used without X and in an unattended fashion, so there's no easy way of solving this, in my humble opinion. I have no plans to solve it at this moment, but let me know your ideas and code if you come up with something.</p>
<p>If you used youtube-dl to download a video and it wrote the video file to your hard drive, finishing with a completion message of 100%, the video is downloaded, so youtube-dl has finished its job and usually it's not to blame for problems that happen later. Not every video player supports FLV or MP4 files and every codec out there needed to play YouTube videos. In Linux, for example, I am generally pleased with <ahref="http://www.mplayerhq.hu/">MPlayer</a>. In Windows, I tend to use <ahref="http://www.videolan.org/">VLC</a>. Those usually work flawlessly.</p>
<p>Due to changes in YouTube, youtube-dl is now forced to provide the final video URL directly instead of the ones it used to provide, which were based on the "get_video" resource. The new URLs are real and work too, but they need to be used in combination with the <code>--cookies</code> option to be useful for external applications. <ahref="https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/closed#issue/41">Issue 41</a> in the issue tracker contains a bit more information about the problem.</p>
<p>youtube has switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. You can update youtube-dl with <codestyle="white-space:pre;">sudo youtube-dl --update</code> (or <code>python youtube-dl --update</code>).
<h1id="q-unable-to-download-video">ERROR: unable to download video</h1>
<p>youtube requires an additional signature since September 2012 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. You can update youtube-dl with <codestyle="white-space:pre;">sudo youtube-dl --update</code> (or <code>python youtube-dl --update</code>).</p>
