diff --git a/apps/api-daemon/src/youtubePolling.ts b/apps/api-daemon/src/youtubePolling.ts
index dae1252..86e1d73 100644
--- a/apps/api-daemon/src/youtubePolling.ts
+++ b/apps/api-daemon/src/youtubePolling.ts
@@ -1,10 +1,12 @@
+import { execFile } from "node:child_process";
+import { promisify } from "node:util";
 import { prisma } from "@streamclipper/db";
 import { env } from "./env";
 import { streamIngestQueue } from "./queues";
 import { sendTelegramMessage } from "./telegram";
+import { ytdlpAntiBotArgs } from "./ytdlpCookies";
 
-const BROWSER_USER_AGENT =
-  "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/120.0 Safari/537.36";
+const execFileAsync = promisify(execFile);
 
 /**
  * Live detection failures are kept per channel and surfaced via GET /status
@@ -13,33 +15,28 @@ const BROWSER_USER_AGENT =
 export const lastPollErrors = new Map<string, string>();
 
 /**
- * Live detection is a plain page fetch, not a yt-dlp invocation. Resolving
- * downloadable formats (what yt-dlp does even in --simulate mode) is what
- * triggers YouTube's bot-check and proof-of-origin token requirements — but
- * we don't need stream bytes here, just whether the channel is live, which
- * is embedded directly in the channel's /live page HTML (`isLive`/`videoId`
- * in ytInitialData). This avoids cookies/PO-token entirely for polling;
- * those are only needed later, for the actual stream-ingest capture.
+ * A channel's /live page HTML embeds dozens of unrelated `videoId`s (channel
+ * video list, recommendations, etc.) — a plain regex grabbed whichever one
+ * happened to appear first, which had nothing to do with the actual live
+ * broadcast (confirmed: captured recordings didn't match the real stream).
+ * yt-dlp's extractor correctly resolves the channel's *current* live video,
+ * so the check goes back through it. Crucially, no `-f` format selector is
+ * passed here: format resolution is what triggers YouTube's PO-token wall,
+ * and this call only needs the video id / live flag, not downloadable
+ * formats — those are only resolved later, in the actual capture.
  */
 async function findLiveVideoId(channelId: string): Promise<string | null> {
   const liveUrl = `https://www.youtube.com/channel/${channelId}/live`;
 
   try {
-    const res = await fetch(liveUrl, { headers: { "User-Agent": BROWSER_USER_AGENT } });
-    if (!res.ok) {
-      lastPollErrors.set(channelId, `HTTP ${res.status} fetching ${liveUrl}`);
-      return null;
-    }
-
-    const html = await res.text();
+    const { stdout } = await execFileAsync(
+      "yt-dlp",
+      ["--simulate", "--no-warnings", ...ytdlpAntiBotArgs(), "--print", "%(id)s", liveUrl],
+      { timeout: 20_000 },
+    );
     lastPollErrors.delete(channelId);
-
-    if (!/"isLive":true/.test(html)) {
-      return null;
-    }
-
-    const match = html.match(/"videoId":"([^"]+)"/);
-    return match ? match[1] : null;
+    const videoId = stdout.trim().split("\n")[0];
+    return videoId || null;
   } catch (err) {
     const message = err instanceof Error ? err.message : String(err);
     lastPollErrors.set(channelId, message.slice(0, 500));