YT Download failure

[kw469]

Your question

Linux - Kubuntu 25.04 - v9.5.0.2 stable / companion app v2.0.19

I had posted just yesterday in a different thread what I had (thought I had) learned about making successful YT downloads. That appears to have stopped working today.

I had successfully downloaded several 480p videos, but then this following URL has completely failed. I initially tried D/Ling not being logged in to YT. Received a download failed message. Logged in to YT. Still a download failed message. I checked -- VPN was off. I tried Surfshark connecting to two different locations. Both still failed to download.

FWIW... the URL in question is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MqNVA52PPh0

(an old historical video about the USN SUBROC anti-submarine weapon.)

Addon & CoApp version and details

version: 9.5.0.2
target: mozilla
channel: stable
lang: en-US
coapp: {"found":true,"path":"/home/steve/.local/share/vdhcoapp/vdhcoapp","version":"2.0.19","new_version":false}
license: {"unneeded":true}
platform: x86-64 linux
UA: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:141.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/141.0
{
"privacy_accept": true,
"last_download_directory": {
"__serializer_tag": "option_some",
"__serializer_value": {
"__serializer_tag": "primitive",
"__serializer_value": "/media/steve/usr2/Videos/Youtube"
}
},
"never_show_no_incognito_msg_again": true,
"view_options": {
"all_tabs": false,
"low_quality": false,
"sort_by_status": true,
"sort_reverse": false,
"show_button_clean": true,
"show_button_clean_all": false,
"show_button_convert_local": false,
"hide_downloaded": false
},
"open_count_store": 11,
"successfull_dl": 22
}

[kw469]

ETA: After the first few failures, I also cleared my YT cookies / browser cache. Problems persisted even afterwards. FWIW.

[kw469]

I don't get it...

I just turned Surfshark off... and engaged Private Internet Access (PIA). I refreshed the Firefox browser tab of that URL. Video Downloadhelper would not even show a download icon / link -- it could not find the video. I refreshed the browser page. No luck. I turned PIA off. So, now... NO VPN at all engaged. Was logged in to YT. I refreshed the Firefox browser page... clicked play... got a download indication that a video stream was recognized... So I cliecked VDH -> Download. THIS time... it downloaded.... !?! I am flummoxed as to why this suddenly stops working... but starts working some time later.

[GrampaWildWilly]

I do not work for VDH. I am just another user. Also, please read #2214.

The weapon video downloaded fine for me. There is speculation that clearing YouTube-specific cookies could be a good idea. Clearing cache is unlikely to be relevant. Being logged in on YouTube is probably irrelevant. (I was not logged in for my download.) VPN can sometimes give relief but it is likely temporary. It seems YouTube has a mysterious algorithm for deciding somebody deserves to be blocked. I invite you to search the web in an attempt to pin down the exact parameters of this algorithm. I have so far failed. Maybe you'll have better luck.

With Firefox, if you tell it to delete cookies for a given domain, it also goes through the potentially time-consuming & probably useless exercise of also deleting associated disk cache entries. But you can get the same effect as clearing cache by just reloading the page with Ctrl+F5. So you probably need to get some sort of browser extension that manipulates just cookies & nothing else. There's a number of them out there.

Your experience is not unusual. Another thing I have yet to get the web to tell me is how YouTube decides to lift a block on somebody. Apparently, you finally got your block lifted. Thank your lucky stars & move on. But don't download too much from YouTube. How much is too much? Again, I invite you to try to find that answer. Good luck.