How do I use youtube-dl's --add-header option?

Question

I'm trying to add a custom header using youtube-dl, a popular video downloader with command line interface.

I'm using PowerShell (or CMD) on Windows 10.

The official documentation says like the following but I can't seem to use it properly.

--add-header FIELD:VALUE
Specify a custom HTTP header and its value, separated by a colon ':'. You can use this option multiple times

I'm trying to add multiple headers for the request like:

"Accept-Encoding": "identity;q=1, *;q=0",
"Range": "bytes=6488064-",
"Referer": "https://avideosite.net/video/0123456",
"User-Agent": "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.80 Safari/537.36"

But when I tried something like

start youtube-dl --add-header "Accept-Encoding":"identity;q=1, *;q=0" --add-header "Range":"bytes=6488064-" --add-header "Referer":"https://avideosite.net/video/0123456" --add-header "User-Agent":"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.80 Safari/537.36" "http://11.22.333.444:8280/abcdefg=.mp4?st=97WbFiADB5Hla7Y-fZx58g&e=1560574126"

It doesn't work and throws an error like this:

Start-Process : A positional parameter cannot be found that accepts argument
'Accept-Encoding'.
At line:1 char:1
+ start youtube-dl --add-header "Accept-Encoding":"identity;q=1, *;q=0" ...
+ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
    + CategoryInfo          : InvalidArgument: (:) [Start-Process], ParameterBindingException
    + FullyQualifiedErrorId : PositionalParameterNotFound,Microsoft.PowerShell.Commands.StartProcessCommand

What am I doing wrong?

Also, is there a proper way to put it into Python script using youtube_dl library?

Answer 1

So my problem was not having youtube-dl.exe in my PATH, which prevented me from even starting youtube-dl. So let me answer my own question about --add-header option.

About --add-header option, it should be something like foo:"bar" for each item.

For example, my original command from the question should be like:

$ youtube-dl --add-header Accept-Encoding:"identity;q=1, *;q=0" --add-header Range:"bytes=6488064-" --add-header Referer:"https://avideosite.net/video/0123456" --add-header User-Agent:"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/75.0.3770.80 Safari/537.36" http://11.22.333.444:8280/abcdefg=.mp4?st=97WbFiADB5Hla7Y-fZx58g&e=1560574126

Remember that if you have &(ampersand) character in the url like in my case, you'll have to wrap it with " ".

Answer 2

Adding an additional answer here because I cannot comment yet. The accepted answer suggests using the "--add-header" option in youtube-dl to add a referer in the header. I couldn't get this to work but did have sucess using the "--referer" option which does the same thing. example usage is as follows:

youtube-dl --referer https://exampleVideoHost.com/hostURLWhereEmbeddedVideoAppears https://exampleVideoHost.com/videoSRCvalue