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Asked: 2014-03-09 14:07:30 +0800 CST

Unable to download videos using youtube-dl ('sig error'), how to correct?

  • 772

I used to download videos using youtube-dl command line tool, from the past two days whenever i try to download any video I get an error as shown below.

$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFew8mgQJ9o
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] bFew8mgQJ9o: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] bFew8mgQJ9o: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] bFew8mgQJ9o: Extracting video information
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 4645, in <module>
    main()
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 4636, in main
    _real_main()
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 4620, in _real_main
    retcode = fd.download(all_urls)
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 869, in download
    ie.extract(url)
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 1135, in extract
    return self._real_extract(url)
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 1406, in _real_extract
    url_map = dict((ud['itag'][0], ud['url'][0] + '&signature=' + ud['sig'][0]) for ud in url_data)
  File "/usr/bin/youtube-dl", line 1406, in <genexpr>
    url_map = dict((ud['itag'][0], ud['url'][0] + '&signature=' + ud['sig'][0]) for ud in url_data)
KeyError: 'sig'

whats going on?

python

4 Answers

  1. Had exactly the same problem.

    Updated youtube-dl via:

    sudo youtube-dl -U

    Run youtube-dl via sudo

    sudo youtube-dl and it will inform that they have changed distribution and need to update. Press enter and you should be good to go.

    • 20

  2. You need to export your proxy settings before you can use youtube-dl to download videos from youtube. To do this, export proxy settings using:

    export http_proxy=http://username:password@host:port_no/
export https_proxy=https://username:password@host:port_no/
export HTTP_PROXY=http://username:password@host:port_no/
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://username:password@host:port_no/

    Replace username, password, host and port_no with your respective variables. Remember to replace any special characters, if any, in your username or password with their HTML codes. Ignore username and password if you don't have one and export them as:

    export HTTP_PROXY=http://host:port_no/

    etc.

    For ex:

    export HTTP_PROXY=http://123431212:[email protected]:3128/

    You can also write this to your ~/.bashrc file to avoid writing them again and again for future sessions.

    Retry downloading videos after doing this.

    • 1

  3. When I tried to upgrade with sudo as indicated in the other answer:

    sudo youtube-dl -U

    I got a message saying that youtube-dl had been installed using a package manager and I should use the same to upgrade it. But I had already done

    sudo easy_install -U youtube-dl

    In the end, just using sudo to run it worked.

    sudo youtube-dl
    • 1

  4. Install youtube-dl with sudo apt-get install youtube-dl from command-line, then use:

    sudo youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bFew8mgQJ9o"

    Make sure, that you use sudo before the above command!

    • -1