Unable to download videos using youtube-dl ('sig error'), how to correct?

Had exactly the same problem.

Updated youtube-dl via:

sudo youtube-dl -U

Run youtube-dl via sudo

sudo youtube-dl and it will inform that they have changed distribution and need to update. Press enter and you should be good to go.

You need to export your proxy settings before you can use youtube-dl to download videos from youtube. To do this, export proxy settings using:

export http_proxy=http://username:password@host:port_no/
export https_proxy=https://username:password@host:port_no/
export HTTP_PROXY=http://username:password@host:port_no/
export HTTPS_PROXY=https://username:password@host:port_no/

Replace username, password, host and port_no with your respective variables. Remember to replace any special characters, if any, in your username or password with their HTML codes. Ignore username and password if you don't have one and export them as:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://host:port_no/

etc.

For ex:

export HTTP_PROXY=http://123431212:[email protected]:3128/

You can also write this to your ~/.bashrc file to avoid writing them again and again for future sessions.

Retry downloading videos after doing this.

When I tried to upgrade with sudo as indicated in the other answer:

sudo youtube-dl -U

I got a message saying that youtube-dl had been installed using a package manager and I should use the same to upgrade it. But I had already done

sudo easy_install -U youtube-dl

In the end, just using sudo to run it worked.

sudo youtube-dl