youtube-dl: motherless.com HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

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
youtube-dl --version
2021.12.17

Verbose log

youtube-dl -vF --no-check-certificate https://motherless.com/02FB80C
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: [u'-vF', u'--no-check-certificate', u'https://motherless.com/02FB80C']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
[debug] Python 2.7.18 (CPython x86_64 64bit) - Darwin-22.5.0-x86_64-i386-64bit - OpenSSL 1.0.2u  20 Dec 2019
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 6.0, ffprobe 6.0, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[Motherless] 02FB80C: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden (caused by HTTPError()); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/youtube_dl-2021.12.17-py2.7.egg/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 678, in _request_webpage
    return self._downloader.urlopen(url_or_request)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/site-packages/youtube_dl-2021.12.17-py2.7.egg/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 2461, in urlopen
    return self._opener.open(req, timeout=self._socket_timeout)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 435, in open
    response = meth(req, response)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 548, in http_response
    'http', request, response, code, msg, hdrs)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 473, in error
    return self._call_chain(*args)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 407, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/urllib2.py", line 556, in http_error_default
    raise HTTPError(req.get_full_url(), code, msg, hdrs, fp)

Description

  • get this error: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden
  • this was working yesterday so I suspect something changed on the site
  • able to play videos on browser

About this issue

  • Original URL
  • State: open
  • Created 4 months ago
  • Reactions: 1
  • Comments: 16 (6 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

that’s what I done with --user-agent Mozilla/5.0 do I need the full string; the stuff in brackets and other stuff?

firefox is using Mozilla/5.0

sorry ignore that, the guide says to use the whole string, trying now.