1st May 2020, 1 min read

youtube-dl HTTP 403 error

youtube-dl is a set of Python scripts for downloading videos from YouTube, Twitter, Vimeo, and many other sites, see for example the list of supported sites. This is a handy tool if you want to watch videos or listen to music on your smartphone: Download them with youtube-dl and store them on your smartphone. Also see Youtube video to mp3.

I had some issues downloading a YouTube video using youtube-dl.

$ youtube-dl https://youtu.be/26QTzeOV8Gs 
[ youtube ]  26QTzeOV8Gs: Downloading webpage
ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

The following command did the trick:

$ youtube-dl --rm-cache-dir
Removing cache dir /home/klm/.cache/youtube-dl ...