A YouTube link can fail with "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot" while every
other YouTube download works — YouTube gates INDIVIDUAL videos behind a
signed-in session. Measured on prod job 273: all twelve of yt-dlp's player
clients fail on that one video while its neighbours download fine, the bgutil
PO-token sidecar is live and answering, and the newest yt-dlp fails identically.
So the download is not broken by our stack or a stale yt-dlp, and no retry,
client switch or upgrade gets past it. A cookie is the only way in.
The failure copy already sends the user to Settings -> Account -> Download
authentication, but YouTube was not in the cookie host registry, so that
dropdown could not help them: the app asked for something it did not offer.
credentials: YouTube joins SUPPORTED_HOSTS (youtube.com, youtu.be,
youtube-nocookie.com). The Settings dropdown, the SEC-12 host scope and the
private-asset cache salt all derive from the row, so that is the whole wiring.
adapters: a signed-in YouTube download runs only cookie-capable player clients.
Measured against yt-dlp's own INNERTUBE_CLIENTS table: with account cookies
attached yt-dlp REMOVES every client whose SUPPORTS_COOKIES is False, and a set
it empties that way raises "No player clients have been requested" — which is
not a per-client flake it retries past. Our primary set is android_vr, one of
those, so without this the cookie would have failed the download on attempt 1
and never reached the POT-backed web fallback it exists for. A test pins the
client list against the installed yt-dlp so a version bump turns the gate red
instead of silently un-authing every YouTube download, and the empty-set message
joins the retriable markers as the second line of defence.
errors: catalog entries for the wall with and without a cookie, so a user who
has already added cookies is told they were rejected (YouTube rotates exported
ones) rather than to add some. The marker is quote-agnostic: YouTube writes the
apostrophe as U+2019, so "you're not a bot" with a straight quote never matches
the real text. EN + HU copy.
peter
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