YouTube-DL: Anyone else getting really slow download speeds from YouTube?

[Rekrul]

I know YouTube-DL hasn't been updated in a long time, however I'm still using it because I have an old system with an old version of Windows and none of the newer forks that I've tried work for me (OLD system!).

Anyway, I've noticed that for the last couple weeks, about 80-90% of the time when I tell it to download a video from YouTube, I get REALLY slow download speeds. Sometimes it estimates that it will take an hour to download 200MB. If I cancel the download and retry it 5-6 times, I'll usually get a faster speed and the video downloads quickly. Then I try to download another video, and it's back to a snail's pace. I then have to cancel the download 5-6 times until I get a faster speed, rinse and repeat.

I'm just wondering if it's just me or if YT has done something that slowed down YouTube-DL. Watching videos seems fine (I usually just use 720p), it's downloading them that's usually agonizingly slow.

It's also gotten worse. At first most videos downloaded fine and only some would be slow. Now slow downloads are the rule and fast downloads are the exception.

Downloads from other sites are fine.

[sambat]

I've had it hit and miss recently.
Switched to yt-dlp and (fingers crossed) it's been ok.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2021.10.10/yt-dlp.exe

[davexnet]

I've had it hit and miss recently.
Switched to yt-dlp and (fingers crossed) it's been ok.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2021.10.10/yt-dlp.exe

Interestingly enough Windows Defender removed it as malware

[Rekrul]

I've had it hit and miss recently.

Earlier, I had to retry a download seven times before I got a good speed.

Switched to yt-dlp and (fingers crossed) it's been ok

Unfortunately, that's one of the forks that won't work for me. The official YouTube-DL was compiled in such a way that it didn't care what version of Windows you had. All the forks, as is typical, are compiled with default settings so that they only work on newer versions of Windows. Unfortunately, I don't know how to compile source code myself.

[codehound]

You can use -N 16 in your syntax to increase thread number for multithreaded downloading.

Or aria2c as an external downloader.

--external-downloader aria2c

yt-dlp discord server. Use the HELP channel. You are both very mistaken in some of your assumptions. The developer himself is onboard every day too.
https://discord.gg/yhDmksawcs

[El Heggunte]

YouTube-DL: Anyone else getting really slow download speeds from YouTube?

Me too. Thanks for asking.
I have just changed the --user-agent string, and the trick has worked so far.

[Rekrul]

Me too. Thanks for asking.
I have just changed the --user-agent string, and the trick has worked so far.

What did you use?

[El Heggunte]

Me too. Thanks for asking.
I have just changed the --user-agent string, and the trick has worked so far.

What did you use?

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0",

— the one used by Waterfox.

[Rekrul]

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0",

— the one used by Waterfox.

Unfortunately that didn't help for me. I tried a couple different user agent strings, but I still get the same painfully slow speeds most of the time.

It's really getting to be a pain in the ass having to retry every download 4-10 times to get a good speed.

[codehound]

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0",

— the one used by Waterfox.

Unfortunately that didn't help for me. I tried a couple different user agent strings, but I still get the same painfully slow speeds most of the time.

It's really getting to be a pain in the ass having to retry every download 4-10 times to get a good speed.

Why persist with youtube-dl when its dead in the water since June ? Youtube are on to their last json script and are throttling it. You are answering your own question every time you say you are getting painfully slow DL speeds. Use yt-dlp.

[Rekrul]

Why persist with youtube-dl when its dead in the water since June ? Youtube are on to their last json script and are throttling it. You are answering your own question every time you say you are getting painfully slow DL speeds. Use yt-dlp.

You missed the part of my message where I stated that I have an old system and CAN'T run yt-dlp. As in when I try, I'm told that it's not a valid Win32 program and nothing happens.

I'd love to be using a more up to date program, but I don't see that happening in the near future, unless someone can give me beginner level instructions for compiling it myself to work on an old version of Windows, like YouTube-DL did.

[codehound]

^^ @Rekrul: I did see that and I am making some enquiries. Because its Python based (exactly the same as youtube-dl) it shouldn't make a difference to whether Win is x86 or x64. I'll post back findings.

[Rekrul]

^^ @Rekrul: I did see that and I am making some enquiries. Because its Python based (exactly the same as youtube-dl) it shouldn't make a difference to whether Win is x86 or x64. I'll post back findings.

Thank you. I'm sorry if I came off sounding snippy.

For reference, I still have (brace yourself), Windows XP.

Yes, I know it's considered obsolete and is no longer supported, but...

I don't have the money to get a new system right now. I don't have a copy of Windows 7 (which is no longer really supported either) and even if I did, I don't want to nuke a working system and start over from scratch without having a backup system that I can use if something goes wrong. Even if I had the money to get a new system, I really dislike Windows 10's spyware and forced updates. I know nothing about Linux and dread the idea of having to learn a new OS. So, at least for now, this is what I have.

[codehound]

All you can do us try the x86 release for 32bit Win
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2021.10.10/yt-dlp_x86.exe

You'll also need the x86 version of ffmpeg

yt-dlp provide customised releases of ffmpeg to streamline usage alongside their app because standard ffmpeg produces errors under certain circumstances. And did do with youtube-dl too but was largely ignored. yt-dlp devs did something about it.
https://github.com/yt-dlp/FFmpeg-Builds/releases/download/autobuild-2021-10-11-15-51/f...-win32-gpl.zip

Please post back any results (should you decide to have a trial). Would be interesting to know.

[Rekrul]

All you can do us try the x86 release for 32bit Win
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2021.10.10/yt-dlp_x86.exe

Nope.

"The procedure entry point _wputenv_s could not be located in the dynamic link library mscvrt.dll."

Typical error when something is compiled for Win7 or better.

[codehound]

Thx for reporting back. Bad news.

The official line from the developer himself is:
Minimum yt-dlp_x86.exe works on either 32 or 64bit vista sp3+
Minimum yt-dlp.exe works on 64bit win7+

If you can get to this level you're good to go.

[Rekrul]

Thx for reporting back. Bad news.

The official line from the developer himself is:
Minimum yt-dlp_x86.exe works on either 32 or 64bit vista sp3+
Minimum yt-dlp.exe works on 64bit win7+

Pretty much what I figured.

You know what gets me? Most software that doesn't work on XP doesn't actually require any new features that Vista+ provides, it's just that all the software used to develop it doesn't bother to make binaries that will function on older versions of Windows.

[Rekrul]

For what it's worth...

I was getting really slow speeds all night and no amount of retrying would speed them up. So I dumped the URLs to a text file and fed them to Internet Download Accelerator. Even with eight connections per file active, I still only got about 500K/s.

So it's not just YouTube-DL getting slow download speeds.

[El Heggunte]

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0",

— the one used by Waterfox.

Unfortunately that didn't help for me. I tried a couple different user agent strings, but I still get the same painfully slow speeds most of the time.

UPDATE:
yesterday the trick that I had suggested didn't work anymore.
Apologies.

For what it's worth...

I was getting really slow speeds all night and no amount of retrying would speed them up. So I dumped the URLs to a text file and fed them to Internet Download Accelerator. Even with eight connections per file active, I still only got about 500K/s.

So it's not just YouTube-DL getting slow download speeds.

Yesterday I found this information:

{{
Hi! I'm one of the yt-dlp devs who worked on this throttling issue. Saw someone asked about this on the reddit.
Here's my attempt at a quick rundown:
Method 1: The actual fix:
The throttling is caused by a "n" parameter in the video playback url. This has similarities to the signature. You need to descramble it using a js function provided in the player js (base.js). If it is not descrambled correctly, you get throttled.
See these comments for more info:

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecomment-894619419

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/29326#issuecomment-866674128 (see quoted content, looks like the original comment was deleted)

In yt-dlp we have yet to implement this, since our js interpreter does not support some of the required functions/operations
Method 2: The workaround yt-dlp uses:
The throttling issue only impacts JS-based Innertube API player clients currently (WEB, MWEB, WEB_REMIX, etc.). Non-JS-based clients (ANDROID, IOS, etc.) already have the signature and n-param descrambled in the video URL YouTube gives us. We can request the player response payload for specific clients using the https://www.youtube.com/youtubei/v1/player Innertube API endpoint.
}}


SOURCE: https://code.videolan.org/videolan/vlc/-/issues/26174#note_286445

[Elhombresombra]

Me too. Thanks for asking.
I have just changed the --user-agent string, and the trick has worked so far.

What did you use?

"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0",

— the one used by Waterfox.

I tried the same trick with a number of different User Agent strings, but it seems that youtube-dl does not like the spaces in the string! Did you throw in that string without or with the double (or single) quotation marks (' ")???

[lomero]

if you have some space you can add string to "....."

[Elhombresombra]

if you have some space you can add string to "....."

Er... sorry, I didn't get this one. If youtube-dl doesn't digest the spaces in the user agent string, I guess I should replace the spaces with something else (but that would alter the "genuine" appearance of the string), OR... what?

[lomero]

this is another example:

youtube-dl --no-part --restrict-filenames --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/92.0.4515.107 Safari/537.36" .."mpd link"

anyway i recommend replacing yt-dl with yt-dlp...

[Elhombresombra]

Ok, let me see if I got it right.
If I go in the "Troubleshooting information" of my browser, at the line "User agent" it says

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0

So if I want youtube-dl to appear as my browser I should add

--user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 5.1; rv:52.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/52.0"

with the double quotation marks (") despite youtube-dl's HELP file does not mention them at all? Do you confirm?..

[codehound]

with the double quotation marks (") despite youtube-dl's HELP file does not mention them at all? Do you confirm?..

youtube-dl developers assume you have a very basic knowledge of the command line prompt and / or powershell, since that is how you operate it from the Windows environment. They actually don't mention you must hit the Return key after issuing every syntax either.

They aren't reinventing the wheel, they are supplying a download aid.

Did you do any basic familiarization of the CLI before embarking with a command line program ?

https://www.howtogeek.com/694949/how-to-escape-spaces-in-file-paths-on-the-windows-command-line/

Footnotes:

This throttling is now a known cause and reported issue, adding a user-agent string is fruitless. In fact, adding a user agent-string is extremely rarely needed for anything, in 99.99 % of cases its more the referer that's needed. And yes I know referer is spelt incorrectly, but it was originally; so as to not muddy the waters, IP has never corrected it.

youtube-dl is dead in the water since mid June - yt-dlp is the way to go (anyway, even if youtube-dl gets facelifted). They have implemented a workaround for this throttling. The latest Windows executable is here
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2021.10.10/yt-dlp.exe

[Blasterox]

The MP4 files doesn't have sound :C

[Tom Saurus]

I tried yt-dlp and have had good results so far with it. I gave it a try because of the YouTube throttle issue.

[alexsmith]

Same here and I'm very (positively) surprised by yt-dlp. I didn't even know about its existence. I'm switching to it straight away.

[djg666]

Another one here. Switched to DLP, thank you everyone.

[ikomrad]

yt-dlp is the answer. I tried using aria2 as the external downloader with youtube-dl to little effect. But yt-dlp downloads videos blazinging fast.