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what are some ways to torify debian 13.6 or yt-dlp 2026.07.04 if yt believes I'm a bot? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 3 months ago by to c/linux@lemmy.ml
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sometimes youtube believes I'm a bot and won't allow downloading stuff from them with yt-dlp 2026.07.04 on debian 13.6.

I could torify the whole computer, so next time I open a terminal and execute yt-dlp it uses tor by default. Sadly, I don't know how to do that.

Another way would be to torify only yt-dlp, but neither do I know how to do that.

Changing the mac address and hostname did nothing.

Can you help?

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[–] 5 points 3 months ago (3 children)

MAC is for your local network.

Hostname is not relevant because the endpoints you're connecting to are not doing reverse lookups.

Your Public IP from your ISP is all they see. They've also blocked VPN endpoint IP address space.

They aren't tracking you through software on your machine, just the global address space. Best you can do is see if your ISP has IP6 space you can be attached to, because they don't have a good way to block that yet.

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  • [–] 1 point 3 months ago* (2 children)

    It would be more accurate to say they try and block the vpn providers and Tor exit nodes. In practice, they do have ~95% of Tor exit nodes blacklisted but major vpn providers it's closer to 40%. Vpn providers go through a lot of effort to hide their exit traffic and it's pretty simple to use a provider that has a reasonably robust cli to just rotate nodes until you find one that works

    Connect

    Test known-good video using yt-dlp

    If fail, use vpn cli to connect to a new node

    Reeat until success

    If your provider let's you connect to specific nodes you can even store the last-known-good and use it on first connect until it gets blacklisted, extending uptime considerably

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