A few days ago I was using --proxy to get around geo-restrictions on Bilibili tv. It was actually working great, but then it started to falter, I got inconsistent downloads for a few days, and now it’s not working at all. At first I thought it had something to do with Bilibili tv, but I’m actually getting the same timeout errors when I try to download normal YouTube videos by --proxy, too.
For Bilibili: ERROR: [BiliIntl] None: Unable to download webpage: <urlopen error timed out> (caused by URLError(timeout('timed out')))
And for YouTube: WARNING: [youtube] Unable to download API page: <urlopen error timed out> (caused by URLError(timeout('timed out'))) ERROR: [youtube] EKFZmLyoYlU: Unable to download API page: <urlopen error timed out> (caused by URLError(timeout('timed out')))
I tried several different proxy IPs, in case maybe proxies closer to my location would work better, but all of them give me the same timeout error. Does anyone have any idea what changed for me? Is there anything one can do to make --proxy not timeout like this? My internet might just be shit, but it was working like a charm a few days ago, so maybe that’s not even the problem?
If there’s some setting I could change that says, “don’t worry if the internet is slow, just keep trying, don’t timeout after ~20 seconds, go for sixty seconds, take as long as you need” or something like that, that would be great.
Could be nothing changed on your end. You said it happens on YouTube as well so there should be plenty of YouTube videos available in your country you can use as an example to see if it’s your internet without --proxy. You can also use tools like Pingplotter to diagnose general internet issues.
I already mentioned increasing retries in your last post, and VPNs. Maybe try --force-ipv4 or --force-ipv6 to see if it’s an IP addressing issue which can happen sometimes. If your internet is fine, if it’s super important, maybe try getting one of those cloud based virtual machine services that’s hosted closer to where you’re downloading from.
Thanks for the suggestions, though I’m afraid --force-ipv4 and --force-ipv6 don’t do anything for me. I’ve just tried downloading a Dailymotion video using --proxy, and that gives me that same timeout error (downloading YouTube videos and Dailymotion videos works fine for me without --proxy). I just tried switching to a proxy IP that was in the exact same region of my country, just to see if it was a distance issue, but that didn’t change a thing, same timeout error.
Sorry to be a bother, would you be willing to try downloading a video with --proxy, just to see if it works? If it works for you and not for me then I feel I must be doing something wrong, but then again, it was working fine just a few days ago, so I know this can work. I doubt yt-dlp’s --proxy function stopped working in the last few days for some reason, but I’d like to know if other people can get it to work, just to make sure it is a problem with something I’m doing.
Thanks again.
I’m running this line, if you’d be willing to try it yourself and see if it works or not:
tyvm, that’s just what I needed, for the moment anyway. --proxy works with that! How does one find proxies that work? Looking them up on google gave me a lot of options that didn’t work, and the only one that was working for me a few days ago was another one some helpful person on this board suggested.
Regardless, maybe I should just pay for something.
Tried a few other Chinese proxies I found with a quick google search, no difference.
Tried without any proxy, got 版权地区受限 which roughly translates to “Territorial Copyright Restricted” (according to google) which doesn’t really say anything we don’t already know.
Process of elimination would indicate the issue is with bilibili.tv. Perhaps they are cracking down on proxies. So you could try actual VPNs. But if they really wanted to they could crack down on those as well pretty easily. NordVPN has a free 30 day trial.
It’s mostly trial and error when it comes to finding a free one that works. Protonvpn has a free tier that should work fine for smaller geoblocks like this.
That particular IP was working fine a few days ago, maybe something got changed? But then again I get the same ‘timed out’ thing with every proxy I try that I can find on the internet.
Does anyone have a free IP proxy that will work to download Bilibili tv videos, or even just YouTube videos? I don’t need a proxy for YouTube videos, I’m just curious if something is wrong with --proxy (I bet there’s nothing wrong with --proxy, I just want to make sure)
I’m not sure it’s a problem with Bilibili, since I get the same timeout errors when trying to download YouTube and Dailymotion videos with --proxy
I also tried a bunch of other proxies, some from Chile, Singapore, Canada, etc., all give me timeout errors.
If you try using --proxy to download a YouTube video (even though that’s not necessary), do you get the same timeout error, or does it go through for you? If you get the same error for YouTube videos, as I do, then that would make me think it’s not a problem with Bilibili tv (although, who knows, there may be more than one problem here). Thanks a bunch for bearing with me on this, I greatly appreciate the help.
It’s just killing me that about two weeks ago I discovered a bunch of great videos on Bilibili that I wanted to save, but downloads were randomly failing and I had to figure out that Bilibili needs --referer for stable downloads, then I finally started archiving… and then one week ago Bilibili changed it’s geo-restriction so I couldn’t download anymore without --proxy. Someone on this board very helpfully taught me about --proxy and I started using that for a few days to get around the geo-restrictions… and then bam! Something else goes wrong, --proxy doesn’t work anymore, not even for non-Bilibili videos, it’s just endless timeout errors out of the blue.
It seems like fate just doesn’t want me to get videos from Bilibili tv for some dang reason.
I tried downloading a YT video that I can already watch, but adding proxy, and it’s failing as well.
However last update to ytdlp stable was March 4th (which is what I’m using). If --proxy’s code was broken I would think there’d be more than just you having issues, and we would have seen it going back to the last release. But then again, most people are probably using VPNs now anyway, so there might not be many people still using traditional proxies left.
Someone else in the thread suggested a proxy that works, so I think it must just be that the proxies one finds on googles are generally unreliable? I should probably just get a dedicated proxy for myself.
Someone mentioned a proxy that’s working, so it was probably just the other proxies going bad, just like you said, nothing wrong with yt-dlp.
Well, I should probably go ahead and get nordvpn. Various YouTubers have only advertised it to me a dozen or more times, maybe I’ll use one of those coupon codes.
