Monthly Archives: May 2020

youtube-dl ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

 in GNU/Linux  tagged error / pip / youtube-dl by

Recently, we were getting the following error in youtube-dl :

ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

We weren’t sure what that error meant (in the case of youtube-dl as the video is public) so we updated pip and youtube-dl to be sure that our problem was not that. The commands we used were the following:

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python -m pip install --upgrade pip;
pip install --upgrade youtube-dl;

After the updates, we still got the same error… After some google-fu we read that it could be a caching issue! We cleared the cache as follows:

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youtube-dl --rm-cache-dir;

Guess what? After that, the problem was resolved and we were able to reuse youtube-dl.