yt-dlp: kick.com videos - HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

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Checklist

I’m reporting that a supported site is broken
I’ve verified that I’m running yt-dlp version 2023.03.04 (update instructions) or later (specify commit)
I’ve checked that all provided URLs are playable in a browser with the same IP and same login details
I’ve checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
I’ve searched known issues and the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones. DO NOT post duplicates
I’ve read the guidelines for opening an issue
I’ve read about sharing account credentials and I’m willing to share it if required

Region

Sweden

Provide a description that is worded well enough to be understood

Yt-dlp gets stuck on a 403 forbidden error on kick.com video sites. The site still works and plays in browser but I do get redirected via a cloudflare site which I’m suspecting is the problem. The website version works and plays the video without requiring login on Firefox and Chrome. I’m on the latest 2023.03.04 version of yt-dlp.

Debugging attempts: Using session cookies via --cookies cookies.txt downloaded through a browser extension does not work. Still getting a 403 error.

Forcing the user agent to be Mozilla via --user-agent “Mozilla/5.0” has no effect. Still getting a 403 error.

Grabbing the m3u8 stream from inspecting memory in browser and downloading it via yt-dlp that way works i.e: yt-dlp https://stream.kick.com/ivs/v1/196233775518/LfDRYYsAP6oJ/2023/4/8/2/37/iddbzqX5UQuJ/media/hls/master.m3u8

Hence it seems to not be able to resolve the website.

If there is a way to resolve cloudflare I could not find it in the issue tracker and if I missed it I apologize, I don’t mean to waste anyone’s time. Thank you for all your hard work!

How to reproduce: yt-dlp https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e

Output including error: [generic] 234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e: Downloading webpage ERROR: [generic] Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden (caused by <HTTPError 403: 'Forbidden'>); please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using yt-dlp -U

Provide verbose output that clearly demonstrates the problem

Run your yt-dlp command with -vU flag added (yt-dlp -vU <your command line>)
If using API, add 'verbose': True to YoutubeDL params instead
Copy the WHOLE output (starting with [debug] Command-line config) and insert it below

Complete Verbose Output

yt-dlp https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e -vU
[debug] Command-line config: ['https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e', '-vU']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1252, fs utf-8, pref cp1252, out utf-8, error utf-8, screen utf-8
[debug] yt-dlp version 2022.11.11 [8b64402] (pip)
[debug] Python 3.9.6 (CPython AMD64 64bit) - Windows-10-10.0.19045-SP0 (OpenSSL 1.1.1k  25 Mar 2021)
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 2020-12-15-git-32586a42da-full_build-www.gyan.dev, ffprobe 2020-12-15-git-32586a42da-full_build-www.gyan.dev
[debug] Optional libraries: Cryptodome-3.16.0, brotli-1.0.9, certifi-2022.12.07, mutagen-1.46.0, sqlite3-2.6.0, websockets-10.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[debug] Loaded 1723 extractors
[debug] Fetching release info: https://api.github.com/repos/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest
Latest version: 2023.03.04, Current version: 2022.11.11
[debug] Downloading _update_spec from https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/download/2023.03.04/_update_spec
ERROR: You installed yt-dlp with pip or using the wheel from PyPi; Use that to update
[debug] [generic] Extracting URL: https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e
[generic] 234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e: Downloading webpage
ERROR: [generic] Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden (caused by <HTTPError 403: 'Forbidden'>); please report this issue on  https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues?q= , filling out the appropriate issue template. Confirm you are on the latest version using  yt-dlp -U
  File "c:\python39\lib\site-packages\yt_dlp\extractor\common.py", line 674, in extract
    ie_result = self._real_extract(url)
  File "c:\python39\lib\site-packages\yt_dlp\extractor\generic.py", line 2582, in _real_extract
    full_response = self._request_webpage(url, video_id, headers={
  File "c:\python39\lib\site-packages\yt_dlp\extractor\common.py", line 825, in _request_webpage
    raise ExtractorError(errmsg, cause=err)

  File "c:\python39\lib\site-packages\yt_dlp\extractor\common.py", line 807, in _request_webpage
    return self._downloader.urlopen(self._create_request(url_or_request, data, headers, query))
  File "c:\python39\lib\site-packages\yt_dlp\YoutubeDL.py", line 3692, in urlopen
    return self._opener.open(req, timeout=self._socket_timeout)
  File "c:\python39\lib\urllib\request.py", line 523, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "c:\python39\lib\urllib\request.py", line 632, in http_response
    response = self.parent.error(
  File "c:\python39\lib\urllib\request.py", line 561, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "c:\python39\lib\urllib\request.py", line 494, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "c:\python39\lib\urllib\request.py", line 641, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.full_url, code, msg, hdrs, fp)
urllib.error.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

About this issue

Original URL
State: open
Created a year ago
Reactions: 4
Comments: 71 (12 by maintainers)

Links to this issue

Archived Roflgator Kick.com steams

Most upvoted comments

workaround for now is to add --legacy-server-connect to your command

bashonly on Apr 19, 2023

Could you elaborate on how this works?

Cloudflare seem to have blocked it 😦

Here’s a new automated workaround (once again, the manual workaround is documented here)

download curl-impersonate a. MacOS: download this link b. Linux: download one of the top 3 files here. Run uname -m to find out which one c. Windows: curl-impersonate-win
extract the folder, and copy the below files to the same folder as yt-dlp (you may discard the remain files): a. MacOS and Linux: curl_chrome110 and curl-impersonate-chrome b. Windows: all the files, I guess
you can now run the below commands to download videos from kick.com. The only part you need to modify is URL in the yt-dlp command (and the file name, if you don’t like kickcomcookies.txt for some reason)

curl_chrome110 https://kick.com/ -c kickcomcookies.txt
yt-dlp --add-header "User-Agent:Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/110.0.0.0 Safari/537.36" --cookies kickcomcookies.txt URL

React with a 👍 if it worked 😃

gamer191 on Sep 11, 2023

I’ve pushed a change to the Kick extractor. Now it will continue to try to extract the video if the first request fails.

Here’s what you can try:

With your yt-dlp win exe, run yt-dlp --update-to nightly
Try yt-dlp -v https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e
If that fails, then try navigating to the site in your browser, and passing cookies from browser to yt-dlp: yt-dlp -v --cookies-from-browser chrome https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e (or replace chrome with whatever browser you visit kick.com with)
If the above also fails, then find your browser’s user-agent string (you can type “what is my user-agent” into duckduckgo or google), and try running: yt-dlp -v --user-agent "USER_AGENT" --cookies-from-browser chrome https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e (replace USER_AGENT with your actual user-agent string)

If successful, please reply with which worked for you (2, 3 or 4)

If you are still getting an error, please post the verbose log as text

bashonly on Apr 8, 2023

and you will have to (manually) navigate to Kick in a browser again

Obviously still not reliable for livestreams, but if you have curl installed (winget install curl) you can run the following to automate it:

curl https://kick.com/ -c kickdotcomcookies.txt -H "User-Agent: ujhgtfjhgfbv"
yt-dlp https://kick.com --cookies kickdotcomcookies.txt --add-header "User-Agent: ujhgtfjhgfbv"

ujhgtfjhgfbv is a random string from me banging my keyboard. i’d recommend replacing it (in both commands) since I expect it to get blocked after I post this

gamer191 on Jul 12, 2023

I’ve pushed a change to the Kick extractor. Now it will continue to try to extract the video if the first request fails.

Here’s what you can try:

With your yt-dlp win exe, run yt-dlp --update-to nightly

Try yt-dlp -v https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e

If that fails, then try navigating to the site in your browser, and passing cookies from browser to yt-dlp: yt-dlp -v --cookies-from-browser chrome https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e (or replace chrome with whatever browser you visit kick.com with)

If the above also fails, then find your browser’s user-agent string (you can type “what is my user-agent” into duckduckgo or google), and try running: yt-dlp -v --user-agent "USER_AGENT" --cookies-from-browser chrome https://kick.com/video/234e331d-f8bd-4935-b72d-0ec5354a652e (replace USER_AGENT with your actual user-agent string)

If successful, please reply with which worked for you (2, 3 or 4)

If you are still getting an error, please post the verbose log as text

Thank you so much! Step 4 worked for me after trying the previous steps.

andrew1-1 on May 28, 2023

workaround for now is to add --legacy-server-connect to your command

is this safe to use, Is RFC 5746 secure renegotiation important? (like would it be similar to accessing a webpage over http where it could have been tampered with? )

You’re literally downloading silly videos with meaningless streamers and e-girls, not your bank account. Relax.

Pentaphon on May 13, 2023

Website works but yt-dlp gets 403’d with the latest nightly.

However, you can still download the VOD by getting the master m3u8 and plugging that into yt-dlp as described in this video guide.

https://streamable.com/xbel1y

Pentaphon on Apr 16, 2023

note that #7595 (curl_cffi) still works

$ yt-dlp --ignore-config --impersonate chrome -vF 'https://kick.com/video/dd8c8125-cf6b-46c8-ad87-770507c389ec'
[debug] Command-line config: ['--ignore-config', '--impersonate', 'chrome', '-vF', 'https://kick.com/video/dd8c8125-cf6b-46c8-ad87-770507c389ec']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, pref UTF-8, out utf-8, error utf-8, screen utf-8
[debug] yt-dlp version stable@2023.11.16 from yt-dlp/yt-dlp [24f827875]
[debug] Lazy loading extractors is disabled
[debug] Python 3.11.6 (CPython x86_64 64bit) - Linux-6.6.4-arch1-1-x86_64-with-glibc2.38 (OpenSSL 3.1.4 24 Oct 2023, glibc 2.38)
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 6.1 (setts), ffprobe 6.1
[debug] Optional libraries: Cryptodome-3.12.0, brotlicffi-1.1.0.0, certifi-2023.11.17, curl_cffi-0.5.10, mutagen-1.47.0, requests-2.31.0, sqlite3-3.44.2, urllib3-2.1.0, websockets-12.0
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[debug] Request Handlers: urllib, requests, websockets, curl_cffi
[debug] Loaded 1915 extractors
[KickVOD] Setting up session
[KickVOD] Extracting URL: https://kick.com/video/dd8c8125-cf6b-46c8-ad87-770507c389ec
[KickVOD] dd8c8125-cf6b-46c8-ad87-770507c389ec: Downloading API JSON
[KickVOD] dd8c8125-cf6b-46c8-ad87-770507c389ec: Downloading m3u8 information
[debug] Formats sorted by: hasvid, ie_pref, lang, quality, res, fps, hdr:12(7), vcodec:vp9.2(10), channels, acodec, size, br, asr, proto, vext, aext, hasaud, source, id
[info] Available formats for dd8c8125-cf6b-46c8-ad87-770507c389ec:
ID      EXT RESOLUTION FPS │  FILESIZE   TBR PROTO │ VCODEC      ACODEC
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
160p    mp4 284x160     30 │ ~ 1.73GiB  230k m3u8  │ avc1.4D401F mp4a.40.2
360p    mp4 640x360     30 │ ~ 4.74GiB  630k m3u8  │ avc1.4D401F mp4a.40.2
480p    mp4 852x480     30 │ ~12.50GiB 1663k m3u8  │ avc1.4D401F mp4a.40.2
720p60  mp4 1280x720    60 │ ~27.50GiB 3658k m3u8  │ avc1.4D401F mp4a.40.2
1080p60 mp4 1920x1080   60 │ ~54.81GiB 7291k m3u8  │ avc1.64002A mp4a.40.2

bashonly on Dec 9, 2023

@RevSnowfox #7595 will most likely fix it

For those who don’t want to go through the message history, here’s an automated workaround, and here’s a manual workaround

gamer191 on Sep 14, 2023

still works for me, your ip[|range] may be blacklisted.

Nobody is getting IP blacklisted. They’re just not using the master.m3u8 link from the public-facing link.

Pentaphon on May 4, 2023

does --legacy-server-connect help with this issue?

this appears to fix the issue. just re-verified that the regular approach results in 403, adding --legacy-server-connect results in successful download.

ghost on Apr 14, 2023