The youtube-dl tool on Debian 10 is out of date, it seems even the sid version is behind, by a good few months.

After some searching I have found a way to fix this.

Please note you need to do you OWN RESEARCH in to fixing this. I am not responsible for loss or problems caused by following what I have put here.

Firstly I was getting the following error

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSHubLg7NE [youtube] 0JSHubLg7NE: Downloading webpage [youtube] 0JSHubLg7NE: Downloading video info webpage ERROR: 0JSHubLg7NE: YouTube said: This video is unavailable.

The webpage here was a little helpful

*https://askubuntu.com/questions/1200552/youtube-dl-troubleshooting-error-this-video-is-unavailable

In providing an explanation and some fixes.

Firstly on Debian the internal update option is disabled so

youtube-dl -U

Won't work, reading further this seems to download the latest version

While the above instructions worked for me, The old version was still installed, this needs to be removed so doing this before hand may help.

However if you want to check the current version before removing you can use:

youtube-dl —version

Then remove with:

apt remove youtube-dl -

The instructions

wget http://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

You will still need to change the permissions as per above website. I am not repeating them here, you need to read up.

However – Debian appears to expect youtube-dl to be in /usr/bin.

The above solution downloads to /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl, you can either put in the path manually when running as in:

/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0JSHubLg7NE

Which gets rather tedious to keep doing that.

In order to get round this, I have copied the binary to where Debian wants it

cp /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl /usr/bin/youtube-dl

Which seems to work for me, but is probably the wrong way to go about doing this.

You can now find the version that is now installed by using

youtube-dl —version

2020.01.24

Hopefully this is useful. You need to do your own research but the problem is fixable.

Once you have upgraded you can download youtube videos in the normal way with youtube-dl.

#debian, #youtube-dl, #error, #fix, #solution, #gnu, #linux

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