Someone on r/Python put the whole problem in four lines this March: "i've been running a pipeline that pulls transcripts from youtube videos, about 200-400 per day for a client project. started with youtube-transcript-api because obviously. no api key, simple interface, worked great on my machine. then i deployed to aws and it immediately broke. turns out youtube just blocks cloud provider IPs."
That post is the template for most of the YouTube threads we read this year. The code is fine. The library is fine. The server is the problem, before the first request even goes out. The FAQs on /en/proxies-for/youtube cover the basics; this goes under them.
Why it works on your laptop and dies on the server
YouTube decides how much it trusts a request partly from the address class it came from, and cloud hosting ranges start with less trust than a home connection. Your laptop sits behind an ISP address. AWS, Hetzner, Railway and the rest sit in ranges published as datacenter space.
The symptoms vary. yt-dlp prints "Sign in to confirm you're not a bot". youtube-transcript-api raises a request-blocked error or returns nothing for a video that clearly has captions. Sometimes it is a 429 or a 403, sometimes an empty body with a 200.
Volume does not rescue you. The r/Python poster said it: "doesn't matter how many requests you're making". One request a day from a cloud address gets the same treatment as a thousand, so jitter and a second cheap VPS do nothing. From r/webdev in May: "they figured out i was using server proxies and flagged all those datacenter ips as bots. i tried a bunch of stuff api roulette with piped, switching servers, you name it but they just bloc". Piped and the other frontends run on datacenter addresses too, so rotating between them felt like progress and was not.
A datacenter proxy moves you from one blocked class to the same blocked class. A residential or static ISP proxy moves you into the class your laptop was already in. That is the whole trick.
How to confirm it is the address and not your code
Run the identical command from your laptop and from the server, against the same video, within the same minute; if only the server fails, the address class is the cause.
yt-dlp --skip-download --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" # laptop
yt-dlp --skip-download --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID" # server, same command
Same yt-dlp version on both, updated the same day. If the laptop gets a .vtt file and the server gets a sign-in wall, stop debugging your Python. If both fail, update yt-dlp first (it changes often).
Signed caption URLs only work from the exit that fetched the page
The caption and media URLs YouTube hands back are signed for the client that asked, and the IP is part of what the signature covers, so the follow-up fetch has to leave through the same exit as the page fetch. A developer on r/webdev learned this in August: "first version pulled captions server-side with yt-dlp. worked fine locally, then I deployed it and it just stopped working, turns out youtube signs the caption URLs and if the request c[omes from a different IP it fails]". Their fix was a browser extension, so both requests came from the user's own machine. Fine for a consumer tool. Useless for a nightly batch job, where the rule is short. Two requests, one exit.
With a static ISP proxy this is automatic: one address, the signatures match. With a rotating residential pool, per-request rotation breaks in a way that looks random. The page loads, the caption fetch 403s, and the same video works on retry because that time both requests shared an exit. Use a sticky session for the pair (a session id in the username on most pools). Rotate between videos if you like, never between the two halves of one video.
Pointing yt-dlp and youtube-transcript-api at a proxy
Both tools take an ordinary HTTP proxy URL with credentials embedded, and nothing else needs installing.
yt-dlp --proxy "http://user:pass@host:port" \
--skip-download --write-auto-sub --sub-lang en \
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
youtube-transcript-api has a proxy config object in recent versions; older versions take a plain proxies dict the way requests does. Check what you have installed and use its documented shape; the string http://user:pass@host:port is the same either way. Set it once at startup and keep it for the run. Build the string per request with a fresh session id and you have reintroduced the signed-URL problem. Test with one video. Then ten. Then the batch.
Cookies help, and they pin you to one address
Cookies exported from a logged-in browser reduce the sign-in wall, and they also tie that Google account to whatever address the cookies are used from. yt-dlp takes them with --cookies cookies.txt or --cookies-from-browser, and once YouTube sees an account the bot wall shows up less.
The trade is that the account is now the thing being watched. Log in from Frankfurt at 09:00 and from a datacenter box in Virginia at 09:02 and you have described a stolen session. So use cookies from one static address only, with a throwaway account. Do not put your channel's Google account into a scraper. Ever.
Estimating residential traffic for a transcript pipeline
Residential proxies bill per gigabyte and a transcript fetch is small, so do the math on your own numbers before you buy. Run one video through the proxy and read the bytes off the proxy dashboard. A run is one page fetch (a few hundred KB of HTML and player JSON) plus one caption file (a few tens of KB). Multiply by videos per day, then by 30.
Compare that with a video download, which is the entire file. A ten minute 1080p video is hundreds of megabytes. Fifty of those a day and per-GB billing stops making sense; a static ISP address at a flat monthly price is the right shape. Thousands of transcripts a day at a few hundred KB each and residential per GB is fine.
Geo-restricted videos, logged out
A proxy that exits in the right country changes what YouTube serves for a geo-restricted video, as long as the exit is a residential or ISP address in that country and you are not logged in with an account that says otherwise. VPN exits are the usual first attempt and the usual first failure. From r/ProtonVPN: "I've observed Youtube is blocking most nodes by most VPN providers if you're logged out."
An r/DataHoarder thread from August wanted Italian football highlights, had a browser proxy for viewing, but "cant find a single extension to download the video". Viewing and downloading are different problems. For the second, yt-dlp with --proxy on the same Italian exit is the honest answer, with the usual caveat: yt-dlp breaks when YouTube changes something and gets fixed a few days later. We are not promising any download tool works every day of the week. Our static ISP addresses cover DE, GB, US, HK, FR and JP; Italy is a residential job.
Running several channels: ISP or residential
One static address per channel, kept for the life of that channel, is the setup for logged-in channel management; residential rotation is the wrong tool because a session that changes exit every few minutes looks exactly like an account being shared. The question came up on BlackHatWorld in March: "I'm managing several YouTube channels on and all of them are getting shadowban. I'm using good accounts and that's not the problem, I don't know what's happening. What proxy platform do you recommend me to use to buy? And other thing, should I use ISP proxies or residential proxies."
ISP. One per channel. Pair it with a separate browser profile per channel so cookies do not leak between them; the antidetect threads on the same forum land on "unique proxies per profile" too. Never move a channel between addresses without a reason.
Now the part that poster did not want to hear. A proxy changes the address YouTube sees. It does not change what the channel did. Shadowbans and strikes sit on the account, and a clean IP does not remove them. If all your channels got hit at once on one address, separating them helps the next set, not this one.
For mobile proxies and whether you need them here, read /en/blog/do-you-actually-need-mobile-proxies. Short version: usually not for channel management.
View bots and watch hours
We do not sell proxies for view bots, watch-hour services or ranking bots, and no proxy type makes fake watch time count. A BlackHatWorld thread in July asked "which type of proxies or setup they are using" after buying a watch-hour package that appeared to work. It appears to work until the audit. A thread on the same forum a few weeks later: "on August 15th, my YouTube channel was banned for spam, deception, and fraud." Even a reply in a bot-setup thread admitted mobile proxies "won't guarantee bypassing YouTube's" checks. YouTube scores the watch pattern.
If that is what you came for, we are not the vendor. The rest of this page still applies to your scrapers.
What to do this afternoon
Run the yt-dlp command from your laptop and from the server. If only the server fails, get one static ISP address or a residential plan with sticky sessions, put the proxy string in --proxy, and run the same video again. Keep the page fetch and the caption fetch on one exit. Measure the bytes on that first video before you choose between per-GB and flat monthly. Then run the batch.