New yt-dlp release: TikTok watermark-free parsing fixed, 12 more sites added

TikTok watermark-free fix

A quick recap of the mechanism: TikTok's watermark iscomposited into the pixels during server-side transcode, so watermark-free downloading isn't removing anything. It's requesting thestream the platform keeps without the watermark applied.

That stream sits behind a specific API path, and TikTok changed that path. Starting last month, older yt-dlp builds fell back to the ordinary playback endpoint and got the watermarked version. That's why so many people reported the watermark suddenly appearing.

The new release updates the request path and the hit rate is back where it was. We retested with 40 links and 39 came back watermark-free, matching the pre-change result.

Worth noting: the TikTok-only Easy TikTok Video Downloader was unaffected throughout, because it watches one platform and keeps up more closely. That's exactly the value of a single-platform tool, covered in The best TikTok downloader.

New sites supported

The 12 new sites fall into a few groups:

• Regional video platforms: several general video sites in non-English markets

• Online course platforms: open courseware and lecture sites

• Podcast platforms: audio-first sites, where pairing with -x to pull the audio track is genuinely handy

One thing to understand: support for this long taildepends on community contributors. Somebody uses a site, somebody writes an extractor, and then it works. So yt-dlp's 1,800+ coverage wasn't planned by a team, it accumulated — which is also why no commercial product can catch it on breadth.

Playlist paging reworked

Previously, onvery long playlistsof several hundred to a thousand entries, the paging request would stop partway on some platforms, so you ended up with fewer items than the list contained, and it threw no error. That's the hardest class of problem to notice.

The new release changes how paging decides it's finished. If you ran a big batch earlier and suspect it missed things, rerun it with --download-archive the archive flag: anything already downloaded gets skipped, only the gaps get filled, and nothing downloads twice.

The full approach to bulk downloading is in Best for bulk grabs.