The workaround for vanilla youtube-dl is to use it with aria2, with options like: --external-downloader aria2c

The workaround for vanilla youtube-dl is to use it with aria2, with options like: --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args "--continue --max-concurrent-downloads=3 --max-connection-per-server=3 --split 3 --min-split-size 1M" (possibly in your config file) Also, neither --format best nor --format bestvideo chooses the best encoding in all cases; they use bitrate as a heuristic for quality, and a less efficient codec can have higher bitrate but worse quality, resolution, or framerate. The workaround for this is specifying --format with an enumeration of every combination of codec, resolution, and framerate in preferred order, which goes like this: --format "(bestvideo[vcodec^=av01][height>=4320][fps>30]/bestvideo[vcodec^=vp9.2][height>=4320] ... Here's a full example (hmm... they're using it with yt-dlp, which I thought had fixed this?): https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate-YouTube-DL-Scripts-Collection/blob/47715c877a9ac3ecca116fd5ab9693a966bd8a09/scripts/Archivist%20Scripts/Archivist%20Scripts/Playlists/Playlists.sh https://github.com/TheFrenchGhosty/TheFrenchGhostys-Ultimate... I think there's a bit of variation in the exact order among the config files found online. If you're goals are archival, consider also retrieving metadata, thumbnail, and subtitles in all languages; I also have in my config the options: --verbose --download-archive ./ytdl-archive.txt --cookies ./ytdl-cookies.txt --merge-output-format mkv --add-metadata --all-subs --embed-subs --write-info-json --write-thumbnail --no-overwrites --continue --force-ipv4 (the only remaining workaround for age-restricted videos is to give it cookies extracted from a browser with a real Google account logged in)