Downloading Age Restricted Videos With youtube-dl.

A while back youtube.com started adding age restrictions to Videos & trying to download some of these videos with youtube-dl, simply resulted in people receiving the following error message.

WARNING: Unable to download video info webpage: HTTP Error 410: Gone
ERROR: Sign in to confirm your age
This video may be inappropriate for some users.

You still want to download the video right :? The simple solution is to use a browser extension to download your youtube cookies & then pass said cookies to youtube-dl with the --cookies flag. This was all pretty straight forward & I was able to download the age restricted video in no time. Simply follow the steps below if you’d like to be able to do the same.

• Step.1

  Install a browser extension to download your cookies from youtube. I’m running firefox so I installed “this extension” & saved my cookies to my downloads folder.

• Step.2

  Add the --cookies flag to your youtube-dl command in the terminal & follow it with the location of your cookies.txt file.

youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio --cookies /path/to/youtube-cookies.txt $youtubeurl

Thats all there is to it. Run the command & your video should download as normal without giving you any age restriction errors.