Fixing 429 errors

Explanation

429 errors come about when YouTube or other sites decide you've downloaded too much content in a short period of time. There are a few ways to solve this once you get the error, but one way to reduce the frequency of these errors is by increasing the subscription check interval. By default it's 5 minutes, if you set it to 1 hour for example the errors will be much less frequent.

Methods to get rid of the error

1. Use the cookies uploader in the settings to upload a cookies.txt file of your YouTube cookies. Here's a guide that will help you download them. TLDR is you can either do it manually (slowly) or use this Chrome browser extension. Once you have the txt file, upload it using the aforementioned dialog in the Advanced tab in the settings menu.

2. Add the --proxy arg to your global custom args in the settings. Here's an example. If that doesn't work and you're using Docker, try the docker-compose method.

3. Wait a day or so for YouTube to unblock your IP.

Additional solutions

• Suggestions from youtube-dl repo
• Add --sleep-interval,,60 arg to your custom args in your subscription which will cause each video to get downloaded with a delay of 60 seconds