Videos do not play with "HTTPError: 403 Client Error: Forbidden for url" (Full log included)

[kuraikaze]

Context

• Add-on Version: v7.4.2+beta.2
• Kodi Version: 22.0-ALPHA3
• Kodi GUI Language: English
• Operating System: LibreELEC 13.0 (Generic.x86)
• Operating System Language: English

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Expected Behavior

Play video from subscription list.

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Current Behavior

Play attempts start, immediately exits back to subscrption listing.

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Steps to Reproduce

1. Select any video from subscription listing
2. Start play.

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Log

Kodi set to debug logging, plugin.video.youtube set to verbose logging.

kodi.log

addon settings.xml

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Additional Information

There seem to have been a slew of recent possibly related reports that have been closed because no-one actually got around to providing anything useful in the way of logs.
Hopefully this helps ;)

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[kuraikaze]

Aaaaand ... now things are back to working again. 😖

Maybe some rate limiting going on with API keys ? (although nothing shows problematic in the Google API dashboard)
Maybe rate limiting requests/traffic from specific IP of device ?
Maybe some temporary capacity shenannigans with whatever CDN edge server I'm hitting ?
Maybe Youtube/Google doing their annoying thing of temporarily changing policies regionally or with specific users for A/B "testing" ?

It's all a black-box nightmare from my perspective - I don't envy you @MoojMidge, having to navigate this tangled mess. 😵

For completeness sake I've added the log of the, now succesful, video play for comparison.

kodi_2.log

[MoojMidge]

Google/YouTube have become much more aggressive in temporarily blocking IP addresses/ranges but I don't know what may trigger this.

The only people who have reported similar issues with playback are those who are using a VPN or proxy that has been blocked, but generally when this happens it also affects more than just the video servers and so it can be detected.

Other temporary blocks won't impact playback, which is the opposite of what you are experiencing.

Are you using a proxy, or VPN, or DNS server that attempts to bypass geo-blocks or similar?

There seem to have been a slew of recent possibly related reports

Yours appears to be a somewhat unique case. The only slightly related issue I can think of would be #1389, was there some others you were looking at?

Don't have any real insights that can explain this, except that you have enabled the stream redirect option. Unless you have a very good reason to do so, this option should never be enabled.

[kuraikaze]

No proxy/VPN/DNS fuckery in use and Google/YouTube/Youtube-Music etc services on all the other devices NAT-ed behind my router's public IP all behaved normally throughout the incident.

The stream redirect being active is an oops on my part. It was always left off previously - I only turned it on when I was meddling with a whole bunch of settings to see if changed anything at the start of my outage. I thought I had reverted all the fiddling back to my 'normal' config in preparation for collecting the debug log - looks like I missed that one. Doh!

The "related reports" was more of a sweeping generalisation that there have been (to my ignorant perception) a variety of issues raised and forum reports for a while now with the simplistic common denominator of a 403:Forbidden somewhere in their log snippets, if any were included at all.

[kuraikaze]

Starting sometime Sunday afternoon another instance of what looks like the same mysterious error.
No actions on my part that would have impacted any of my Google/Youtube services (no VPN/DNS/geo-locate things, no doing odd stuff with other Google services attached to my account, on the Kodi box or other devices etc.)
Logged out plugin, cleared plugin databases, set debug options, rebooted, logged YT in, collected fresh logs, verified error persistent.

I'm not expecting a different answer from you this time, but just recording the reoccurence and attaching a fresh log in case it might help in future 😜

kodi.log

[MoojMidge]

It is possible that your account has been enrolled in a test for a change in YouTube playback verification that this addon can't handle, but apart from the error itself, there is no indication that this has occurred.

One other thing to change is that you have disabled certificate verification, and this may be something that causes your playback attempts to eventually be deemed to be suspicious in the eyes of Google/YouTube, as no normal client would do this (but is sometimes required when using a mitm proxy to capture or modify encrypted data).

Edit: Thinking about this more, it should not be possible for a server to detect that certificate verification is disabled, so it is unlikely to be a direct cause of whatever is happening.

[kuraikaze]

OK, I'll enable that.
The "Force" part of the verification option gave me the vague notion that it was an option to use only in very specific weird ass, non standard situations or network states, somehow, and was not a part of 'normal' plugin usage.

I am, however, an old fart and very out of touch on the mechanics of current era call/response/verification of authentication over http(s) channels, even more so when protected content/data-streams are involved 😊

[MoojMidge]

Certificate verification can be tricky to do in a cross platform manner and I think this addon used to use a method of making https requests that didn't initially support cert verification, with it being able to be optionally enabled.

Hence the language used for the option, which hasn't changed since it was first implemented with verification disabled by default.

That was many many years ago, but for a long time now performing certificate verification would be expected as normal and recommended.

[kuraikaze]

As of around 2 hours ago (~9a.m. local) things are back to working as expected once more on my Kodi mini-PC.
From memory my last non-working play attempt was around an hour or 2 earlier (I would periodically clear plugin caches, reboot and try again). No settings or network condition changes at my end other than that.

I had been watching the occasional video on an adjacent Amazon Fire TV Stick with the 'official' Youtube app (i.e. not via a sideloaded Kodi install of some description) with no problems during the temporary Kodi PC blockage.

Next time the issue occurs on the Kodi PC I'll change the two devices IPs around and see if the block persists on the Google sanctioned app on the Fire Stick.

Very little (if any ?) logging or detailed error reporting available to me on the vanilla Fire Stick platform but at least it might tell us if the rejection is at a simple IP level, rather than any more comprehensive device/player fingerprinting.

Log of succesful play included for completeness/comparison sake.

kodi.log

[kuraikaze]

Welp...
Another week, another instance of Youtube deciding to deliver HTTP Error: 403 Client Error: Forbidden instead of content.

Tried swapping the IPs of the Kodi PC and the Fire Stick - no luck there. Fire Stick played, Kodi PC gave same error.
Whatever Youtube are doing to block the Kodi PC + plugin is more substantial than a simple IP address blacklist, but that was always going to be a long shot.

Guess I'll wait a day or so and hope it automagically begins to work again. 😞

(No attached log this time, as it's exactly the same error, other than the URL of the individual video I tried to play.)

[MoojMidge]

Tried swapping the IPs of the Kodi PC and the Fire Stick - no luck there. Fire Stick played, Kodi PC gave same error.

This may indeed be the case then:

It is possible that your account has been enrolled in a test for a change in YouTube playback verification that this addon can't handle, but apart from the error itself, there is no indication that this has occurred.

[kuraikaze]

Retried this morning and things are back to working state again, for inscrutable Google/Youtube ... reasons ...
I guess...
😕

[kuraikaze]

Error reoccured today, but I think I've finally got some idea of what the initial trigger might have been ...

Dozed off while watching a video, then when I woke up a few hours later went to replay the end of the video that I'd missed.
This failed to play and I happened to have my laptop nearby and grabbed the kodi.log (unfortunately not set to debug mode, in the course of otherwise normal usage).

I found that just prior to the initial watch of the video the log showed a huge spam of :-

[plugin.video.youtube] data_client:2445(_get_feed)
Failed
(etc.)

(657 times in the space of about 70 seconds before successful initial play, and another 86 after)

There were a few instances of bot check interspersed for a few video IDs (which appear to be nominally successfully passed)

[plugin.video.youtube] player_client:1804(load_stream_info)
Failed to retrieve stream info
Status:        'LOGIN_REQUIRED'
Reason:        'Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot'
video_id:      'UsS6bOYnnOI'
Client:        'ios_testsuite_params'
Auth:          None
Valid visitor: True
[plugin.video.youtube] player_client:1804(load_stream_info)
Failed to retrieve stream info
Status:        'LOGIN_REQUIRED'
Reason:        'Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot'
video_id:      'UsS6bOYnnOI'
Client:        'android_testsuite_params'
Auth:          None
Valid visitor: True

After I woke up and tried to replay the video I got the dreaded:-

[plugin.video.youtube] http_server:537(do_GET)
Stream proxy response not OK
Stream: ('BWzix_Xc6TE', '308') - ('video', 'webm')
Method: 'POST'
Server: 'rr1---sn-1xopouxgoxu-aigl.googlevideo.com'
Target: None
Status: 403 Forbidden

Subsequent plays of any other videos failed.
Looks like Youtube's bot/abuse algorithm had eventually activated for the Kodi PC in the meantime. :(

I don't have a clear idea of why the intial spate of [plugin.video.youtube] data_client:2445(_get_feed) spam started (at 2026-05-08 01:26:22.990 in the log).
Some sort of inconsistency generated between the state of listed items in the Kodi UI and what the plugin thinks should be there. (?)

I've attached the log, for whatever it's worth - maybe you can glean some useful info even from a non-debug version ?

kodi.old.log

Update: The LibreELEC Kodi platform I use has recently had an update that enables usage of external Flatpak binaries. I tried Youtube in Chromium on that, in the hope that it might "unblock" the machine. Videos played there, but unfortunately when I returned to Youtube plugin in Kodi, playback still failed, sadly.
Guess I'll have to wait out the plugin block timer, however long that turns out to be 😞

[MoojMidge]

It may be an additional consequence of the feed failures identified in #1395

When the feeds load normally, they are cached so they do not get retried for some time.

When the feeds fail like they have been doing in some regions during specific time periods, there is nothing to cache so the failing feeds are retried every time you load a new page of My Subscriptions.

As you have limited the number of items per page to 15, you have ended up trying and failing to load these feeds quite a number of times as you navigated through to page 12+ of your My Subscriptions.

Guess I'll have to wait out the plugin block timer, however long that turns out to be 😞

Not sure if the multiple attempts to load feeds is actually contributing to your problem, but once you are able to access things again, you can try the following test version which will limit how often the retries can occur:
https://github.com/MoojMidge/plugin.video.youtube/archive/refs/heads/v7.4.zip

[kuraikaze]

Seems like the ban has expired now (appears to be ~48 hours), so I'll install that test version and monitor. 👍
If any more shenanigans do occur would you prefer debug logs created with the plugin's Verbose logging or shall I leave it on Auto ?

Regarding Settings/General/Items per page: 15 ... the value of 15 is just to give a consistent match with the list page size of the skin's UI. (Transparency by Ronie)
Would upping that to the maximum of 50 be worthwhile, in terms of minimizing hits on the feeds mechanism ?

Also, would twiddling the knobs of some of the plugin's other settings be in any way meaningful or worthwhile ?
e.g.:-
Settings/Advanced/History/Cache size (MB): 50MB
Settings/Advanced/Internet/Requests connect timeout: 12 sec
Settings/Advanced/Internet/Requests read timeout: 27 sec
Settings/Advanced/Internet/Requests cache size (MB): 50
etc.