Downloading Age Restricted Videos With Youtube-DL

yt-dlp is a fork from the now troubled youtube-dl, the best part about yt-dlp aside from being actively maintained is that it follows similar commands to youtube-dl.

Recently I wanted to download a YouTube video using YouTube-DL, but received the following error message:

WARNING: Unable to download video info webpage: HTTP Error 410: Gone
ERROR: Sign in to confirm your age
This video may be inappropriate for some users.

Although I disagree strongly with YouTube’s increasing habit of haphazardly applying age restrictions on videos, I still wanted a local copy of the video.

The solution is to pass a cookie to YouTube as part of the download process in YouTube-DL. I was able to accomplish that with the following steps.

1. I installed the Get Cookies extension in Chrome. This extension allows users to export cookies for a site as a text file.
2. I then visited YouTube.com, while I was logged in, and clicked on the Get
   Cookies icon. Then I clicked on the “Export” button to download my YouTube cookies as a text file.
3. This created a youtube.com_cookies.txt file that I then copied into the YouTube-DL directory on my laptop.
4. Finally I ran the following command in YouTube-DL to pass the cookie to YouTube and download the video:

youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mkv --all-subs --cookies youtube_com.txt [YouTube URL]