--external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args "-j 8 -s 8"
I wrap the entire thing up in some shell script as a .bashrc function which takes a URL, touches the downloaded file (since youtube-dl saves the youtube file modified date), then opens it in vlc.
The throttling also seemed to depend on which server was sending the file; a bunch of recent uploads were throttled, while an obscure video from 8 years ago with <100 views only had the usual small slow-start delay that was common with videos that probably needed to be fetched completely uncached from from a remote data center.
The throttling problem seemed to go away after a few weeks, and returned again for a few hours a . Is it possible the "throttling" was actually some type of bug or configuration error in Google's network and/or data archives?
[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/uti...
It's possible that this behaviour was designed to be pro-user; I can imagine a circumstance where a DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) client hit a patch of network congestion, dropped to a lower quality, then the network cleared up and it downloaded the rest of the video in low quality before it could switch back. Throttling the speeds to just above the bitrate of the video would solve that.
Mind you, that doesn't explain the user-agent targeting described in other comments...
Just install mpv, dude.
It works right out of the box, if youtube-dl is in your PATH.