cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/52778326

to download content I run yt-dlp, current version: stable@2026.08.19

I don't have an account with either google or youtube nor plan I to.

the content I look for doesn't exist on other platforms.

It's not a super elegant solution, but whenever I come across age-restricted videos ytdownloader.io has managed to download them.

If the video was uploaded before youtube forced accounts for age restricted videos (I don't know when that was exactly), you can check on web.archive.org if the video was archived and use the archived url in yt-dlp. If the video was uploaded more recently or there is no archive old enough, I don't know of anyway to download it unfortunately

FYI you should use Grayjay if you don't already, it's excellent

Locking for rule 5.