Youtubedl CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED [duplicate]

Question

I ran this code in Python:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
import youtube_dl


ydl_opts = {
    'format': 'bestaudio/best',
    'postprocessors': [{
        'key': 'FFmpegExtractAudio',
        'preferredcodec': 'mp3',
        'preferredquality': '192',
    }],
}
with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl:
    ydl.download(['YOUTUBE URL'])

I was hoping it would convert the Youtube video to a URL file.

I got a really long error which basically repeated this:

[0;31mERROR:[0m Unable to download webpage: (caused by URLError(SSLCertVerificationError(1, '[SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify failed: unable to get local issuer certificate (_ssl.c:1108)')))

I have searched online but a unsure on how to solve this problem?

Accomplice

Means exactly what it said -- the list of CA certificates backing your Python interpreter's SSL implementation doesn't include a CA signing the certificate used by the server for the site purporting to be YouTube (this could mean your local CA certs are out-of-date, or it could mean that your Internet connection is having connections to YouTube intercepted and replaced with some other site, possibly something that pretends to be YouTube but injects hostile javascript). – Pip

...it's not a problem with your code, so I don't know what you expect us to do here. Talk to your friendly local sysadmin; how to update the CA cert list varies by operating system / Linux distro / etc. – Pip

@CharlesDuffy how can I fix this? – Accomplice

I take it by that question that you don't have a friendly local sysadmin? First question: Which operating system are you running? – Pip

Answer 1

Add the no-check-certificate parameter to the command:

youtube-dl --no-check-certificate

This option was renamed to --no-check-certificates starting with version 2021.10.09 (inclusive).

Bradeord

...if you don't care about whether the site you're connecting to claiming to be YouTube is in fact the real thing. – Pip

Where do I add this since I run it in IDLE? – Accomplice

Reading github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/…, the plain reading is that you should probably set 'no_check_certificate': True in ydl_opts if you want this workaround -- which, again, I strongly recommend against; better to fix your system's CA certificate list (if that's the problem), or find the source of whatever monkey-in-the-middle is intercepting connections to YouTube (if it's that). – Pip

just make sure the site you are connecting to is legit. I use youtube-dl with ffmeg to download some videos from other sites, which I know are legit, so I use this switch oftem. – Bradeord

does this mean YouTube-dl uses wget internally? I tried --external-downloader and still no good – Ineptitude

I added --no-check-certificate but got [youtube] bDhpwNiOHUo: Downloading webpage ERROR: bDhpwNiOHUo: YouTube said: Unable to extract video data – Westberg

Needless to say don't pass any credentials when using --no-check-certificate. Otherwise it should be fine. @Westberg With an error like that, youtubedl probably needs to be updated. (-U) – Tiedeman

@CharlesDuffy: I've run into the same problem as the OP and I'd certainly like to fix my system's CA certificate list. However, I have no idea where and how to start with that. Do you happen to have any pointers towards achieving such a goal? – Photokinesis

to which command? this is a python script where someone does import ... – Strontian