In yt-dlp we have yet to implement this, since our js interpreter does not support some of the required functions/operations (see quoted content, looks like the original comment was deleted) If it is not descrambled correctly, you get throttled. You need to descramble it using a js function provided in the player js (base.js).

The throttling is caused by a 'n' parameter in the video playback url. Saw someone asked about this on the reddit.

Hi! I'm one of the yt-dlp devs who worked on this throttling issue. So it's not just YouTube-DL getting slow download speeds. Even with eight connections per file active, I still only got about 500K/s. So I dumped the URLs to a text file and fed them to Internet Download Accelerator. I was getting really slow speeds all night and no amount of retrying would speed them up. Now slow downloads are the rule and fast downloads are the exception. At first most videos downloaded fine and only some would be slow. Watching videos seems fine (I usually just use 720p), it's downloading them that's usually agonizingly slow.

I'm just wondering if it's just me or if YT has done something that slowed down YouTube-DL. I then have to cancel the download 5-6 times until I get a faster speed, rinse and repeat. Then I try to download another video, and it's back to a snail's pace. If I cancel the download and retry it 5-6 times, I'll usually get a faster speed and the video downloads quickly. Sometimes it estimates that it will take an hour to download 200MB. I know YouTube-DL hasn't been updated in a long time, however I'm still using it because I have an old system with an old version of Windows and none of the newer forks that I've tried work for me ( OLD system!).Īnyway, I've noticed that for the last couple weeks, about 80-90% of the time when I tell it to download a video from YouTube, I get REALLY slow download speeds.

Youtube video download yt