yt-dlp.net exists because searching for a yt-dlp error message returns a GitHub issue thread from 2023 where the fix is in comment 47, or a blog post whose command stopped working two releases ago. Both were once correct. Neither says so.

How the commands here are tested

Every command published on this site is run before the page goes up, on a real machine, against the yt-dlp release named in the badge at the top of the page. If a command needs ffmpeg, it is tested with ffmpeg present and absent, because "it works on my machine" usually means "I installed ffmpeg eighteen months ago and forgot".

When a page says an approach no longer works, that means it was tried and it failed — not that somebody read that it fails. The distinction matters in this niche, where advice gets copied between sites for years after the thing it describes was removed from the tool.

Why the dates are on every page

yt-dlp ships something like two dozen releases a year, and a good fraction of them exist because YouTube changed something. Advice about this tool has a half-life measured in months. Every page here carries the release it was verified against and the date it was last revised, and the sitemap carries the same dates, so a search engine and a reader can both tell stale from current without reading the whole thing first.

What this site is not

Not affiliated with the yt-dlp project. yt-dlp is maintained by its own contributors under the Unlicense. Bugs belong in their issue tracker, not in our inbox — we can tell you what an error means, but we cannot fix the extractor.
Not a download service. There is nothing here that fetches a video for you. The tools on this site build commands and look up error messages; they run in your browser and send nothing anywhere.
Not a way around paying for things. Guides here cover cookies and private videos because those are legitimate needs — your own uploads, a course you paid for, a members-only video you are a member of. What you download is your responsibility; see the terms.

Something here is wrong

Commands rot. If one on this site has stopped working, that is a bug on our side and worth reporting to hello@yt-dlp.net — the page URL and the exact output yt-dlp gave you is enough. Pages get re-verified when a report comes in, and the badge date moves when they do.