Ryan Young YoRyan

"Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

YoRyan / yt-dlp cookies.txt for YouTube.js

Last active June 4, 2026 03:08

Obtain cookies.txt for yt-dlp without external software or browser extensions. Tested with a Firefox private browsing session.

	// This work is marked CC0 1.0 Universal.
	// To view a copy of this mark, visit https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

	// 1. Watch a video
	// 2. Open the network inspector, and pick a request to the www.youtube.com domain
	// 3. Copy the value of the Cookie: request header and store it into a string
	// variable named "cookies" on the JavaScript console
	// cookies = "name=value; ..."
	// 4. Run the code below to obtain the contents of cookies.txt
	// 5. Pass it to yt-dlp with yt-dlp --cookies /path/to/cookies.txt