youtube-dl: https://yt-dl.org/ broken by a German court
Checklist
- I’m reporting a broken site support
- I’ve verified that I’m running youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
- I’ve checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
- I’ve checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
- I’ve searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones
Verbose log
Logs not relevant
Description
When attempting to download youtube-dl as described in README.md or README.txt, you get a “403 forbidden” error. Visiting that website gives this message:
Access denied
Due to a ruling of the Hamburg Regional Court, access to this website is blocked.
Zugriff gesperrt
Aufgrund eines Urteils des Landgerichts Hamburg ist der Zugriff auf diese Website gesperrt
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: open
- Created a year ago
- Reactions: 26
- Comments: 18 (6 by maintainers)
This is true though not what “broken site support” was intended to mean.
There’s no point downloading that version anyway: the court is actually doing you a favour. When a new release is made the DNS will have been reset to avoid this block.
Meanwhile, refer to #30839 for the nightly build that fixes many known issues.
If you really want that version you find the binaries on the github releases page: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/latest
I’m sorry, as you may not like to hear this, but if “There’s no point downloading that version”, which happens to be the latest release, that’s a strong indicator that there should have been a new release since. It’s up to you as maintainers, though. While the list of known issues now fixed seem worthy, there may be good reasons not to have cut a release yet.
Anyway, I didn’t want my main point to be whether there should be a release or not. I wanted to ask: How are we expected to know the latest version? I used to have:
(which I admit perhaps was not the proper way before, either), but now that obviously fails with a 403 error.
Thank you very much for this software. It’s dismaying that it is now having this kind of issues again.
Even if a version was released with all site extractors passing their tests, the turnover of site issues would invalidate the release after a few days. For now, the nightly release is the best bet. Should some site work with 2021.12.07 and not with the latest nightly build, please open a new issue.
A lot of data about available versions is returned as JSON from https://api.github.com/repos/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/releases/latest. For convenience, the nightly builds are released in a different repo and the internal update check uses the corresponding JSON URL (
s/youtube-dl/ytdl-nightly/). These version data sets are generated by GH and are disjoint.Until the domain points to a valid domain, a version of the README that doesn’t mention yt-dl.org is provided in the PR above.
Ohh, I just didn’t notice the nightly build link, thanks!
Why is there no new release? Why is the last one in 2021? If it cannot be solved so that the last version can be downloaded, then why don’t you write that “Youtube-dl cannot be downloaded”? Why is there a link out there that points to an “Access Denied” page?
You don’t want to do that. See above.
is there any workaround to download the youtube-dl.exe file?