How to fix the “token” parameter not in video info for unknown reason error

Technology

If the ‘token parameter’ issue has occurred using youtube-dl on Linux, you’re probably using an outdated version of the command. Here how to fix it under Fedora and Ubuntu.

You have tried to download video or audio from Youtube through the youtube-dl command and you got the following result:

[youtube] 1234567890A: Downloading webpage 
[youtube] 1234567890A: Downloading video info webpage 
ERROR: 1234567890A: "token" parameter not in video info for unknown reason;    please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug.  Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update.    Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

The latest version of the command provides a fix for this error, but maybe your favorite distribution does not already have the committed version on repositories. So, the first thing to do is to remove the outdated version from the system:

$ sudo dnf remove youtube-dl #for Fedora systems
$ sudo apt remove youtube-dl #for Ubuntu systems

After that, you must install the latest version from the official youtube-dl repository on GitHub:

$ sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

If you do not have curl, you can alternatively use wget:

$ sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl