Troubleshooting & Frequently Asked Questions

Q1. The log says “Temporary YouTube Rate Limit (429 RequestBlocked)” and auto-paused. Did I lose my progress?

No data is lost. Every video extracted prior to the pause is already committed to channel_cache.db and exported to transcripts.csv.

Why it happens: Running locally on your PC avoids shared cloud-datacenter IP blocks, but YouTube still enforces per-IP rate limits when hundreds of caption requests originate from a single residential IP within a short window. After two consecutive 429 responses, our worker intentionally pauses so your IP cooldown does not lengthen.

How to resume safely:

1. Increase the Interval dropdown from 2.0s to 3.0s (Conservative) or 5.0s (Large Channel).
2. Wait 15–30 minutes for YouTube’s temporary IP cooldown to expire (or switch networks/mobile hotspot to obtain a fresh IP).
3. Optional: Export a cookies.txt file (Netscape format) and place it inside your output folder.
4. Click ▶️ Extract All / Resume (or 🔄 Retry Failed).

Q2. Browser Cookie option shows Could not copy Chrome cookie database or Failed to decrypt with DPAPI

Recent versions of Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge on Windows lock their cookie database exclusively while any browser window/background process is open, and use Windows App-Bound Encryption (DPAPI). When this happens, our crawler automatically falls back to unauthenticated indexing so your job does not crash. If you need authenticated cookies:

• Recommended: Export a Netscape-format cookies.txt file using an open-source extension like Get cookies.txt LOCALLY and select that file in the GUI, or
• Use Firefox (--cookies-from-browser firefox), which does not use Chromium App-Bound DPAPI locking.

Q3. What is the difference between no_transcript and error in videos.csv?

• no_transcript means the video exists, but either the creator disabled subtitles (TranscriptsDisabled) or YouTube has no caption track for that video (NoTranscriptFound, common on music-only or very short clips). Clicking Retry Failed skips no_transcript videos so you don’t waste requests.
• error means a transient network failure, HTTP 429 rate limit, or unavailable/private video occurred. Clicking 🔄 Retry Failed specifically targets status='error' videos.

Q4. How do I save a Sanitized Diagnostic Report for a bug report?

In the GUI, click 🩺 Save Diagnostic Log in the top-right corner of the Execution Log panel (or run python cli.py --output "./your_folder" --export-diagnostics). The tool creates a plain-text diagnostic_report_YYYYMMDD_HHMMSS.txt file on your computer with your Windows username, API keys, cookies, and proxy credentials automatically replaced with <USER> / <REDACTED>. Nothing is ever sent over the internet automatically—you can open and inspect the text file yourself before attaching it to a support inquiry on our Contact page.