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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[–] 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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