Downloading Niconico Videos with youtube-dl

This article introduces a method to download Niconico videos with youtube-dl.

I opened Niconico for the first time in a year. Nothing’s changed.

Niconico is not as straightforward as other sites.

I got an ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden error.

As a workaround, I recommend you to tried re-downloading the video for multiple times until it succeeds.

As a temporary solution, the following script works. Put your cookies in cookie_niconico.txt.

ydlNiconico(){
    LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8 \
    youtube-dl -i -v \
    -o "/mnt/e/_videos/_youtube_dl/_niconico/%(id)s--%(title)s--%(uploader)s.%(ext)s" \
    --cookies /home/data/youtube-dl/cookie_niconico.txt --download-archive /home/data/youtube-dl/archive.txt \
  --embed-subs --embed-thumbnail --write-info-json --all-subs --sub-format srt \
    "$(cuturlquerystr "$1")"
}

while [[ true ]]; do ydlNiconico "https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm12345" && break || continue ; done

I just noticed until is easier.

until ydlNiconico "https://www.nicovideo.jp/watch/sm12345"; do :; done