Dev Tools · 50m ago
Building a YouTube downloader that survives constant anti-bot changes
A solo developer built a video downloader using yt-dlp, but YouTube's bot detection caused intermittent failures. To cope, they added cookie injection, PO tokens, and a circuit breaker that falls back to pytubefix after 5 consecutive failures. The tool also includes SSRF protection by blocking private IPs.
Meridian48 take
The cat-and-mouse game between YouTube and downloaders is a reminder that any service relying on a platform's unofficial API is inherently fragile, no matter how clever the workarounds.
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Building a Video Downloader That Doesn't Break Every Time YouTube Sneezes →
DEV Community
youtube-downloaderanti-bot-detection