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I'm trying to add a custom header using youtube-dl, a popular video downloader with command line interface.

I'm using PowerShell (or CMD) on Windows 10.

The official documentation says like the following but I can't seem to use it properly.

--add-header FIELD:VALUE
Specify a custom HTTP header and its value, separated by a colon ':'. You can use this option multiple times

I'm trying to add multiple headers for the request like:

"Accept-Encoding": "identity;q=1, *;q=0",
"Range": "bytes=6488064-",
"Referer": "https://avideosite.net/video/0123456",
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.80 Safari/537.36"

But when I tried something like

start youtube-dl --add-header "Accept-Encoding":"identity;q=1, *;q=0" --add-header "Range":"bytes=6488064-" --add-header "Referer":"https://avideosite.net/video/0123456" --add-header "User-Agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.80 Safari/537.36" "http://11.22.333.444:8280/abcdefg=.mp4?st=97WbFiADB5Hla7Y-fZx58g&e=1560574126"

It doesn't work and throws an error like this: 

Start-Process : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument
'Accept-Encoding'.
At line:1 char:1
+ start youtube-dl --add-header "Accept-Encoding":"identity;q=1, *;q=0" ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Start-Process], ParameterBindingException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PositionalParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.StartProcessCommand

What am I doing wrong?

Also, is there a proper way to put it into Python script using youtube_dl library?

Ansgar Wiechers
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user8491363
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    try removing start – Siddharth Das Jun 15 '19 at 08:59
  • @SiddharthDas That'll only give an error youtube-dl : The term 'youtube-dl' is not recognized as the name of a cmdlet, function, script file, or operable program. Check the spelling of the name, or if a path was included, verify that the path is correct and try again. At line:1 char:1 + youtube-dl + ~~~~~~~~~~ + CategoryInfo : ObjectNotFound: (youtube-dl:String) [], CommandNotFoundException + FullyQualifiedErrorId : CommandNotFoundException – user8491363 Jun 15 '19 at 09:27
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    That means either youtube-dl is not correctly installed or path is not added to enviroment variables. – Siddharth Das Jun 15 '19 at 09:32
  • The installation instructions say *"Windows users can download an .exe file and place it in any location on their `PATH` except for `%SYSTEMROOT%\System32`"*. Did you do that? – Ansgar Wiechers Jun 15 '19 at 10:33
  • Oops, I didn't see that. Now I added it to my path and `$youtube-dl` command works like a charm. – user8491363 Jun 15 '19 at 11:44

2 Answers2

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So my problem was not having youtube-dl.exe in my PATH, which prevented me from even starting youtube-dl. So let me answer my own question about --add-header option.

About --add-header option, it should be something like foo:"bar" for each item.

For example, my original command from the question should be like:

$ youtube-dl --add-header Accept-Encoding:"identity;q=1, *;q=0" --add-header Range:"bytes=6488064-" --add-header Referer:"https://avideosite.net/video/0123456" --add-header User-Agent:"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.80 Safari/537.36" http://11.22.333.444:8280/abcdefg=.mp4?st=97WbFiADB5Hla7Y-fZx58g&e=1560574126

Remember that if you have &(ampersand) character in the url like in my case, you'll have to wrap it with " ".

user8491363
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    I think the syntax is `youtube-dl --add-header 'Accept-Encoding:identity;q=1, *;q=0'` instead of `youtube-dl --add-header Accept-Encoding:"identity;q=1, *;q=0"`. – Aero Wang Feb 02 '20 at 02:08
  • @AeroWang: that depends entirely on your shell. `Accept-Encoding:"
    "` is mostly the same as `'Accept-Encoding:
    '`, provided there are no shell variable expansions in the double-quoted section. Single quoted strings are not parsed for shell variables. Unquoted strings without whitespace or shell expansions are concatenated to quoted strings, and the example here has *no shell expansions*. So for the example in this answer, there is no difference for youtube-dl.
     – Martijn Pieters Oct 03 '21 at 11:47
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Adding an additional answer here because I cannot comment yet. The accepted answer suggests using the "--add-header" option in youtube-dl to add a referer in the header. I couldn't get this to work but did have sucess using the "--referer" option which does the same thing. example usage is as follows:

youtube-dl --referer https://exampleVideoHost.com/hostURLWhereEmbeddedVideoAppears https://exampleVideoHost.com/videoSRCvalue
SparkleStep
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