Not able to download PluralSight Course

Checklist

• I’m reporting a broken site support issue
• I’ve verified that I’m running youtube-dl version 2021.04.17
• I’ve checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
• I’ve checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
• I’ve searched the bugtracker for similar bug reports including closed ones
• I’ve read bugs section in FAQ

Verbose log

PASTE VERBOSE LOG HERE

ThinkPad-E14:~$ pluralsight-dl https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/react-js-getting-started/table-of-contents [pluralsight:course] react-js-getting-started: Downloading JSON metadata [download] Downloading playlist: React: Getting Started [pluralsight:course] playlist React: Getting Started: Collected 42 video ids (downloading 42 of them) [download] Downloading video 1 of 42 [pluralsight] Downloading login page ERROR: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden (caused by HTTPError()); 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.

ThinkPad-E14:~$ youtube-dl -U youtube-dl is up-to-date (2021.04.17)

Description

WRITE DESCRIPTION HERE I am trying to download a Pluralsight course but it throwing this error. I am using latest version of youtube-dl and using this script

#!/bin/bash for i in “$@”; do

youtube-dl
–username YOUR-USERNAME-HERE
–password YOUR-PASSWORD-HERE
“$i”
-o “/home/YOUR-USERNAME-HERE/Videos/%(playlist)s/%(chapter_number)02d - %(chapter)s/%(playlist_index)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s”
–sleep-interval 35
–max-sleep-interval 120
–sub-lang en
–sub-format srt
–write-sub

done

[0x7FFFFFFFFFFFFFFF]

My findings are that you can download their videos using the following steps.

• Log into PluralSight’s website in Chrome
• Use this tool to export it’s cookies into a cookies.txt file
• Use this command to download the video

youtube-dl.exe --sleep-interval 300 --max-sleep-interval 500 --cookies "cookies.txt" -f best -o "%(autonumber)s_%(title)s.%(ext)s" --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.111 Safari/537.36" --referer https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/jquery-building-dynamic-websites https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/jquery-building-dynamic-websites

You can download videos using the above method. But, there is a problem! I seriously doubt that when you are using PluralSight’s website or client watching videos, they will randomly sending probe messages back to their server. When you are using youtube-dl, there are no these kind of probe messages, which will results in an account ban. My account has already been permanently locked. It’s not because I download too fast, I actually use a sleep of 600~1000s between downloads and still got locked. They give you two courtesy warning before a permanent ban. If you really want the video, software recording may be the last resort.

[jschin]

same issue having problem using --username and --password.

Can confirm that using cookie file is working as well.

update 24/4 : looks like Pluralsight have implemented account ban on video download behaviour.