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Start typing. Errors match on their exact yt-dlp output.

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yt-dlp error lookup

Paste the line yt-dlp printed. Matching ignores video ids, file paths and numbers, so the message straight out of your terminal works without trimming.

Reading a yt-dlp error

yt-dlp prints three kinds of line, and telling them apart saves most of the guessing:

  • ERROR: — the download stopped. Something has to change before it will work.
  • WARNING: — it carried on, but with less than it wanted. This is the dangerous one, because the download "worked" and quietly produced 360p, or no subtitles, or a file at a quarter of the speed it should have run at. Both nsig extraction failed and the PO token warning look like this.
  • Everything after Traceback — a crash, not a handled failure. Usually a bug in yt-dlp itself or an incompatible Python version. Update first, report second.

The useful part of a long error is almost always the last line, not the first. yt-dlp reports the outermost operation that failed before it reports why, so the first line says "unable to download webpage" and the third says the actual reason.

Before anything else

A large share of the errors people hit are already fixed in a build newer than the one they are running — especially anything mentioning extraction, signatures or missing formats. Confirming the version takes a second, and it is the first question anybody will ask:

check your version first 
yt-dlp --version && yt-dlp -U

If -U reports that it cannot update, yt-dlp was installed through a package manager and has to be updated the same way — which method you used decides how fast fixes reach you.

Frequently asked

Do I need to trim the error before pasting it?
No. Paste the whole line, video id and all. Ids, URLs and bare numbers are ignored on both sides of the comparison, so the id in your message does not stop it matching a page that quotes a different one.
My error is not here.
The pages here cover the sixteen failures that account for most of what people actually hit. If yours is not one of them, running the command again with -v and searching the yt-dlp issue tracker for the last line of that output is the fastest next step — most unlisted errors are extractor bugs with an open issue already.
The error mentions a site that is not YouTube.
Most of these pages apply anyway. 403s, SSL failures, ffmpeg problems and format-selector mistakes are not YouTube-specific. The bot check, PO tokens and nsig extraction are.

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