--rm-cache-dir/--no-cache-dir - What exactly are they used for

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• I’ve looked through the README and FAQ for similar questions
• I’ve searched the bugtracker for similar questions including closed ones

Question

I have written a GUI for youtube-dl and for the last couple of hours I have been experincing some '403: Forbidden` errors when downloading items from yt playlists.

After g searching for a while the most common suggestions I came accross was to run ‘–rm-cache-dir’. I searched what exactly they are for but didn’t quite understand the very few explanations I found.

When I run ‘–rm-cache-dir’ what does this mean for the end-user. what if I just run ’ ‘–no-cache-dir’ for every youtube-dl call?

A side-note question: I would very much to share my GUI program( not open source yet, to be soon I hope), where can I do that?

[pukkandan]

some youtube videos require a signature to be downloaded. This signature is dervied from a function in a /player URL. youtube normally caches these function definitions. If you chose not to use the cache, this /player/ page has to be re-downloaded each time. That is 1 additional request per video. There is no other impact.

The situation is similar for other extractors that use the cache

[Lee-Carre]

@hbtalha

will the user notice the any difference?

Yes;

• performance
• network usage