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wiki: add curl_cffi impersonation fix for yt-dlp 429 errors

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YouTube rate-limits non-browser clients. Installing curl_cffi enables
TLS fingerprint impersonation, fixing HTTP 429 on subtitle downloads.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Marcus Summers
2026-04-09 15:40:17 -04:00
parent 2c51e2b043
commit efc8f22f6c
1 changed files with 20 additions and 0 deletions
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20
05-troubleshooting/yt-dlp-fedora-js-challenge.md
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@@ -121,6 +121,26 @@ yt-dlp --list-formats --remote-components ejs:github \
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID
```
### HTTP 429 Too Many Requests + Impersonation Warning
Downloads or subtitle fetches fail with:
```
WARNING: The extractor specified to use impersonation for this download,
but no impersonate target is available.
ERROR: Unable to download video subtitles for 'en-en-US': HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests
```
**Cause:** yt-dlp needs `curl_cffi` to impersonate a real browser's TLS fingerprint. Without it, YouTube detects the non-browser client and rate-limits with 429s. Subtitle downloads are usually the first to fail.
**Fix:**
```bash
pip3 install --upgrade yt-dlp curl_cffi
```
Once `curl_cffi` is installed, yt-dlp automatically uses browser impersonation and the 429s stop. No config changes needed.
### SABR-Only Streaming Warning
Some videos may show: