Home/ Questions/How to fix “youtube_dl: youtube said unable to extract video data”
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Charlotte Smith
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Asked: 2022-05-17T13:47:37+00:00 In:

How to fix “youtube_dl: youtube said unable to extract video data”

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I’m trying to run a new project. I do a couple of things like this:

import youtube_dl # Youtube_dl is used for download the video
 
 ydl_opt = {"outtmpl" : "/videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s", "format": "bestaudio/best"} # Here we give some advanced settings. outtmpl is used to define the path of the video that we are going to download
 
 def operation(link):
  """
  Start the download operation
  """
  try:
  with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opt) as yd: # The method YoutubeDL() take one argument which is a dictionary for changing default settings
  video = yd.download([link]) # Start the download
  result.set("Your video has been downloaded !")
  except Exception:
  result.set("Sorry, we got an error.")
 
 operation("https://youtube.com/watch?v=...")

But in my program, I am getting the warning:

ERROR: YouTube said: Unable to extract video data

Can someone explain why the “ Youtube_dl: youtube said unable to extract video data” issue happened? Where have I gone wrong? Thank you!

unable to extract video data
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2 Answers

  1. Best Answer
    Expert

    The cause: Perhaps your youtube-dl version is out of date, so you can’t extract video data.

    Solution:  Updating youtube-dl is a helpful way for me to resolve this probblem. These commands depend on how you install it.

    youtube-dl --update (self-update)

pip install -U youtube-dl (via python)

brew upgrade youtube-dl (macOS + homebrew)

choco upgrade youtube-dl (Windows + Chocolatey)
    • 20

  2. Users of ubuntu: 

    sudo apt purge youtube-dl 
sudo pip3 install youtube-dl
hash youtube-dl
    • 17

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