When YouTube demands you log in to "verify your age" which allows them and their parent the privacy-invasion driven advertisement company Google ("Alphabet") track you,
you don't have to.
You can just download the video to your own device using a tool like yt-dlp and view the video using your own favorite video-player.
There are others too, but yt-dlp is open source, does not cost you anything, handles almost every video platform on the Internet, works on most devices with files ready to download at the official location https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp for Linux, Windows and MacOS, while for Android there is also YTDLnis based on yt-dlp available using F-Droid https://f-droid.org at https://android.izzysoft.de/repo/apk/com.deniscerri.ytdl after adding the IzzyOnDroid https://android.izzysoft.de/intro.php repo.
@b9AcE yt-dlp can't download age restricted videos without a Youtube cookie, and to generate that cookie (which expires within less than an hour), you need to log in.
@b9AcE When I try to download an age restricted video with yt-dlp, it always ends with an error message unless I provide it with a fresh youtube.com cookie.
@LordCaramac Maybe the videos you tried with were also marked as private? That would be different of course.
I don't know. I haven't had a personal YouTube/Google account since 2008, so I certainly am not logged in.
@LordCaramac Hmm, maybe it's because you are in a different geographic region and they impose the age-checking with different stringency based on region?
If you can, try making yt-dlp go through some proxy known to be exiting in a different jurisdiction, maybe?
Just a theory.
@b9AcE I'm in Germany, and Germany tends to be very strict when it comes to age restrictions. If the German government had their way, it would be impossible to use any website that delivers age restricted content without proper ID to make sure you're of age.
@LordCaramac Yes, I noticed that your reply-toots had their language set to German, which is why I thought age-checks may be imposed more strictly where you are and maybe using a proxy to elsewhere would circumvent that.
@b9AcE Besides, I just use yt-dlp for my offline video archive. I don't care if the whole world knows what kind of videos I watch or what kind of books I read. They can probably guess from the way I look, anyway, and when Fascism takes over once again, I'll probably get killed one way or another.
@LordCaramac Mhmm. I just almost always download the videos before watching any online-videos, because I like applying my own compress-and-expand audio-filter using ffmpeg to all videos, so I don't have to keep fiddling with the volume levels while watching. :-)
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