Tutorial: Private videos & playlists (legacy 1.8.7)

How do I download private videos and playlists?

To download private videos youtube-dl-gui needs to login to your account, otherwise it cannot access your private videos. Don't worry, youtube-dl-gui will not touch anything, it will only download the video. Youtube-dl-gui uses cookies to authenticate with YouTube, in order to provide the cookies you can use an extension called 'cookies.txt'. This will create a file of the required YouTube cookies.

This tutorial works for playlists too!

1. Install cookies.txt for chrome, or install it for firefox.
2. Navigate to youtube.com.
3. Log in to the YouTube account where te private video is on, if you haven't already.
4. Open cookies.txt through the extensions bar or via the extensions menu.
5. Click on 'To download cookies for this tab click here'.

6. Save the file to a convenient location.
7. Enter the link to the private video into youtube-dl-gui.
8. When youtube-dl-gui shows that this is a private video, click on 'add cookies.txt'.

9. Click on 'browse' and select the downloaded cookies.txt file.
10. Press add to add your cookies.txt file to youtube-dl-gui.

11. If everything worked you should now see the video info, and some green text telling you youtube-dl-gui has succesfully authenticated with youtube!

12. Proceed with downloading the video as you normally would. Youtube-dl-gui will remember the cookie untill you close the program.

Still can't figure it out? Don't worry, open up an issue and I will help you out.