Tubesync Keeps Overwriting cookies.txt

[SinisterCrayon]

I've seen this happen several times now. Everything works OK for hours, sometimes days then suddenly my cookies.txt gets overwritten with what looks like a default cookies.txt.

Any thoughts on why this is happening? Nothing seems pertinent in the logs except the error message that starts coming back from YouTube on age-restricted videos which is usually my first sign something is wrong.

[tcely]

All TubeSync does is provide the path to yt-dlp when a file exists at the configured path.

[meeb]

I believe yt-dlp updates the cookies.txt file to refresh session identifiers and so on. I've not checked that for years though so could do with confirmation. This shouldn't lose your authentication, in fact it should keep it working. If it wasn't updated each run you would quickly have stale auth tokens in the cookies.

[tcely]

You can see how yt-dlp writes a new file for cookies in the functions linked below.

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/blob/aefce1eea4d0b6bab1ec2bd3beff09bff91a39c8/yt_dlp/cookies.py#L1312-L1353

[SinisterCrayon]

I understand that, but something's breaking in the cookies file. Looking at my logs around 7pm last night local time suddenly I started getting "Sign in to confirm your age" errors on videos. Something weird is going on here that doesn't seem to happen with other yt-dlp wrappers I've tried. Basically everything seems to work for a couple of hours, the cookies.txt file gets updated and then I have to replace the cookies.txt file again.

Comparing the two, the new cookies.txt file appears to be missing several lines, most notably the all of the LOGIN_INFO, SID, HSID, SSID etc fields. The new file looks like this (sanitized);

# Netscape HTTP Cookie File
# This file is generated by yt-dlp.  Do not edit.

.youtube.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	1787064405	SEARCH_SAMESITE	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	0	wide	1
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1791161016	__Secure-BUCKET	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1817659578	__Secure-3PSID	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1817659578	__Secure-3PAPISID	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	FALSE	0	PREF	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1816019926	__Secure-1PSIDTS	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1816019926	__Secure-3PSIDTS	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1816020132	__Secure-3PSIDCC	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1800059656	VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1800059656	VISITOR_PRIVACY_METADATA	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1800021807	__Secure-YNID	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1800021807	__Secure-ROLLOUT_TOKEN	----
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	0	SOCS	CAI
.youtube.com	TRUE	/	TRUE	1784508820	GPS	1

This is literally the entire file and I'm not sure this has the information necessary to login successfully.

[meeb]

As @tcely says tubesync doesn't do anything at all with the cookies.txt file, we just pass it as an argument to yt-dlp so your issue is certainly unusual.

[SinisterCrayon]

Yeah, thanks. I'll probably post something over on yt-dlp's issues list as it's PROBABLY an issue there. For now though I've implemented a quick script to monitor logs for the age restriction message and just put the old cookies.txt file back. I'll just periodically update the "source copy" until I have a resolution.