I used to just yt-dlp any YT video links people share, but that doesn’t work anymore and no ETA on a fix.
My new favorite thing is my PeerTube instance. yt-dlp is basically broken for almost all YT videos now since it doesn’t yet support SABR, and most videos are forcing that now. Peertube’s importer seems to have no problem with it, so that’s where I am.
Someone shares a YT link? Copy, paste into Peertube, wait like 30 seconds for the transcode, and watch. No BS. And if I want to watch it later? Well, there it already is.
Edit: It appears the wonderful people maintaining yt-dlp have fixed that since I last tried back in December.
I’m using https://freetubeapp.io/ and so far it mostly works. You have to stay on top of updates, and age-restricted videos can be a problem, but the feature I love most is that it can subscribe to creators without an account, and it just shows you time-sorted feed. It also has native sponsorblock baked in, and has support for downloading videos, or using an invidious as a proxy.
You can turn off autoplay, comments, recommended videos and other engagement-maxing bullshit, so it’s just a video player without distractions that I can use to follow stuff I’m directly interested in, that doesn’t force content on me.
YouTube a while back enforced some Captcha thing that broke yt-dlp without some other dependency. I’m on mobile right now and don’t have the info on hand, but long story short I had the same issue and fixed it by downloading with dependencies.
Oh, you’re right. It does work after updating. I was on 2025.12.08 which was the latest the last time I messed with it around that same time and saw that the SABR bug had been open since March of 2025. Still open so that was what I had been watching.
I had to update mine and add some extra arguments:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --extractor-args "youtube:player-client=default,-web_safari" -t mp4 "<URL / ID>"
I used to just
yt-dlpany YT video links people share, but that doesn’t work anymore and no ETA on a fix.My new favorite thing is my PeerTube instance.
yt-dlpis basically broken for almost all YT videos now since it doesn’t yet support SABR, and most videos are forcing that now.Someone shares a YT link? Copy, paste into Peertube, wait like 30 seconds for the transcode, and watch. No BS. And if I want to watch it later? Well, there it already is.
Edit: It appears the wonderful people maintaining
yt-dlphave fixed that since I last tried back in December.Yt-dlp still works just fine; I used mine lastnight.
Remember to run ‘yt-dlp -U’ to update it.
I watch something like 20 YouTube videos a day from many different subscriptions. I don’t really want to straight download them all.
I’m using https://freetubeapp.io/ and so far it mostly works. You have to stay on top of updates, and age-restricted videos can be a problem, but the feature I love most is that it can subscribe to creators without an account, and it just shows you time-sorted feed. It also has native sponsorblock baked in, and has support for downloading videos, or using an invidious as a proxy.
You can turn off autoplay, comments, recommended videos and other engagement-maxing bullshit, so it’s just a video player without distractions that I can use to follow stuff I’m directly interested in, that doesn’t force content on me.
Huh. I’m on the latest release and every video I download fails with the SABR notice and link to the issue for it. Maybe it’s regional?
YouTube a while back enforced some Captcha thing that broke yt-dlp without some other dependency. I’m on mobile right now and don’t have the info on hand, but long story short I had the same issue and fixed it by downloading with dependencies.
Post a link that isn’t working for you? Maybe I just haven’t found a broken one…
What version of yt-dlp are you running?
Oh, you’re right. It does work after updating. I was on 2025.12.08 which was the latest the last time I messed with it around that same time and saw that the SABR bug had been open since March of 2025. Still open so that was what I had been watching.
The 2026.02.04 build worked fine.
Still gonna keep my PT instance lol.
I had to update mine and add some extra arguments:
yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --extractor-args "youtube:player-client=default,-web_safari" -t mp4 "<URL / ID>"Update yt-dlp it literally works. ETA is 0