So recently, I was working on my own YouTube downloader project called YT-RNR (https://github.com/Mrtracker-new/YT-Downloader)
— just something I wanted to build for fun and learning.
At first, I thought, “Okay, you paste a link, and boom — it downloads the video.”
But when I started digging deeper, I realized… there’s a lot going on behind the scenes.
When someone pastes a YouTube link, the website doesn’t just magically know what to do.
It actually needs to fetch all the video info, get different resolutions, sometimes merge the audio and video, and finally send it back to you.
Most of these sites use a cool open-source tool called yt-dlp to make it all work.
While building mine, I ran into a question that made me stop —
👉 “What about cookies? Do I need them for authentication?”
I found out that for normal videos, you don’t.
But for age-restricted, private, or premium ones — YouTube won’t let you in unless it knows who you are.
That’s where cookies come in — they basically tell YouTube, “Hey, it’s me, this user is allowed to see it.”
Now here’s the tricky part —
You can use cookies to download such videos, but giving them to random sites is like handing over your YouTube login access.
That’s not safe.
So I started thinking of safer ways:
What if users just upload their cookies temporarily (and I delete them right after)?
Or even better, what if I make it a local app, so cookies never leave their computer?
That’s when I realized why most public downloader websites don’t ask for cookies — it’s risky, and it violates YouTube’s rules.
After a lot of trial and error (and quite a few “why is this not working 😩” moments), I finally got it working smoothly.
Now it downloads public videos perfectly, and the setup is way safer.
If you’re curious or want to try it out yourself, you can clone my GitHub repo and run it locally:
👉 https://github.com/Mrtracker-new/YT-Downloader
Honestly, this project taught me a lot — not just about code, but about how the web really works.
Sometimes it’s not about making something huge; it’s about learning something small that opens your eyes to a whole new layer of how the internet runs.
Top comments (0)