YouTube has been aggressively throttling the default web client.
The iOS client bypasses PO-token requirements and gets less aggressive
rate limiting from Google's side.
- Add --extractor-args youtube:player_client=ios to all yt-dlp calls:
fetch_video_metadata, fetch_channel_metadata, search_youtube,
fetch_available_subs, download_subs_only, fetch_video_comments,
popular fetch flat-playlist crawl, and start_download
- Increase _META_MIN_GAP from 5s to 12s between metadata calls
- Widen jitter from ±2.5s to ±5s for less predictable request timing
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 4.6 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Mattias Thall
8dcbad6e70