YT DLP 403 errors

[DrewScatterday]

Love this bot thanks for your hardwork!

Description

When doing youtube queries I would get a yt dlp error in the logs that looked something like this

https://rr4---sn-5hnekn7z.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=....
403 Unauthorized

and the bot would not play the song

Expected result

Bot plays the song

Actual result

Bot does not play the song due to a yt dlp error

Reproduction Steps

do /play with a longer youtube video

The fix

Changing the ytdlp in the toml seemed to fix it more info here yt-dlp/yt-dlp#14680. I think the newer versions of yt dlp require the install to include the [default] option https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Installation which I believe installs a javascript runtime to help get around 403 errors with dlp

yt-dlp = {version = "^2025.6.30", extras = ["default"]}

[Dysta]

Hello, can you send the URL you give to the /play command? It can be caused by a video that is private.

[DrewScatterday]

@Dysta This video seemed to do it for me but seemed potentially non deterministic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvpfTw0_CRI

[Dysta]

Thank you, the video doesn't seem to be georestricted, I'll check this :)

[DrewScatterday]

No worries, let me know if you can reproduce. Changing the toml to

yt-dlp = {version = "^2025.6.30", extras = ["default"]}

Seemed to fix it for me and haven’t seen any 403 issues since but will keep an eye on it

[Dysta]

A fix is in prod now, lmk if its good for you too :)

[DrewScatterday]

Weird I pulled main - I did add back in the docker-compose.yml

I ran /play with that url 10 times - it failed twice during that 10 times so it seems non deterministic. Maybe its just a quirk with the latest versions of yt dlp with yt trying to clamp down on things

[https @ 0x58b6b5435e80] HTTP error 403 Forbidden
STDERR [in#0 @ 0x58b6b5435040] Error opening input: Server returned 403 Forbidden (access denied)
STDERR Error opening input file https://rr1---sn-a5msenle.googlevideo.com/videoplayback?expire=176947660....
STDERR Error opening input files: Server returned 403 Forbidden (access denied)

[Dysta]

Hello,

After further investigation, it seem that its a random anti bot detection from Yt. The workaround is to embed a JS runtime that is included in the yt-dlp[default] package.

I included this package in JukeBot, using Bun for fast processing and, according to the yt-dlp community, it doesn't require more configuration than that and should work out of the box. It seem that for JukeBot, that is embeding yt-dlp, an additional configuration is required.

I'll continue to investigate on how to setup the yt-dlp js runtime and allowing Juke Bot to handle the anti bot detection.

Thank you for your report 😄

[DrewScatterday]

Yeah I know lava link has something like this https://github.com/kikkia/yt-cipher

But I think youtube is trying add more bot detection avoidance. I've tried several open source bots including jukebot, rawon bot, and BeatDock and all of them have had issues with youtube links currently

[Dysta]

I setup a deno runtime to yt-dlp to fallback in that case of errors in commit 0314e6d

Cannot reproduce to my env since its pretty random but lmk if it fix the issue properly