Youtube-dl is fried; do I update to yt-dlp?

[MintKakapo]

Checklist

• I'm asking a question
• I've looked through the README and FAQ for similar questions
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar questions including closed ones

Question

Yo, I tried downloading a video today and noticed everything's busted. I have the same issues as threads #31534, #31533, #31532, #31531 & #31530 , which leads me to ask this; should I download yt-dlp due to the change of management requesting it (refer to #30568 as well as here in #31530), or will there be an internal patch to vanilla youtube-dl? Just asking this for anyone else who doesn't frequent this page, wondering why everything broke out of the blue.

Edits

1.) Punctuation and added another thread that talks about this
2.) Added this fancy header

[Grub4K]

youtube-dl failed due to occasional inclusion of @user in some data by YouTube, which did not match a regex and caused the program to fail, since it was mistakenly marked as required. Predicting changes in the website is challenging, but typically these should not be required and therefore avoid program failure.

If you don't have specific requirements by all means do try yt-dlp, it has many new features. Both repositories are still getting worked on, though youtube-dl has not seen a regular release yet, while yt-dlp has a release solving this problem, v2023.02.17.

Ultimately it is up to you to pick and choose the application you like the most. There are changes in the default behavior, possibly making it a worse fit. Some people are also constrained by the additional requirements that yt-dlp poses, however for the regular end user those are mostly not noticeable.

[dirkf]

(Overlapped with above)
If your environment supports it, yt-dlp will be fine for you. You can enable various compatibility options if you want it to act as a yt-dl clone, or otherwise use the native command syntax, which is still similar to yt-dl.

Comparing the two programs:

• yt-dlp's core processing is more sophisticated, supporting more complicated download functionality
• extractors are generally easy to port either way: sometimes the yt-dlp extractor will be newer, sometimes not
• yt-dlp has more dependencies, but yt-dl is more likely to run if you have an older environment.

Or you can use the yt-dl git master by installing it with pip from your Python installation (probably 2.7 is the minimum version for which this works, and you need a pip version that is new enough to install from GitHub but old enough to run in 2.7).

Or you can find an unofficial nightly build in a fork of yt-dl, or make your own fork and build the program.

Or you can wait for an official release with the latest changes.

If you are still using yt-dl 2021.12.17, you have more issues than just the uploader_id.

[MintKakapo]

If you are still using yt-dl 2021.12.17, you have a lot more issues than just the uploader_id.

0_0 oh no. That doesn't bode well.

[dirkf]

Just to look at some fixes and enhancements for the YT extractor:

commit 58988c1421b88875a33015b08e4d2ada43021e09
    [YouTube] Bypass age-gating for certain restricted videos
commit 6d829d811932b24be4d3cc8b6c1e0d46c2b1566c
    [YouTube] Fix not finding videos listed under a channel's "shorts" subpage. 
commit 811c480f7b6c25ca510a033e6365d00174135392
    [YouTube] Support JSON3 subtitle format
commit 78ce962f4fe020994c216dd2671546fbe58a5c67
    [youtube] Support channel search
commit 34c06b16f5eb814308392b68dce07bbff62bc406
    Support Youtube Shorts URL format
commit af9e72507ea38e5ab3fa2751ed09ec88021260cb (and more recent updates)
    Implement n-param descrambling using JSInterp

On the other hand the uploader_id issue seems to have gone away by itself -- or, rather, not yet reached London.

The age-gate fix also adds (or restores) extraction of several unrelated metadata items (view/like count, track/album/etc).

[bkraul]

Thanks for this. yt-dlp patched the issue. Switched.

[MintKakapo]

Lots of interesting developments happening :0 Thanks for keeping me posted guys; really appreciate it :)

[MintKakapo]

Closing this thread and referring to #31530 for further developments. Thanks for your insight on this issue, guys! :)

[Tyrewt]

If you are still using yt-dl 2021.12.17, you have a lot more issues than just the uploader_id.

0_0 oh no. That doesn't bode well.

An explanation would have been nice too, as youtube-dl 2021.12.17 is literally the current stable release.

[HighCommander4]

If you are still using yt-dl 2021.12.17, you have more issues than just the uploader_id.

This is an aside, but, wow, is that ever true!

I've been using 2021.12.17 and my YouTube download speeds have been rate-limited to like ~60kB/s, and I assumed that was a server-side limitation that I couldn't do anything about -- but nope, after upgrading to the master branch, downloads are lightning fast.

I am kind of curious what is standing in the way of promoting the version on the master branch to an official release.

[dirkf]

#31585

[dirkf]

Could we maybe get like, a hotfix?

[kylegoetz]

If you are still using yt-dl 2021.12.17, you have more issues than just the uploader_id.

What does that mean? The official website for yt-dl specifically says the latest version is 2021.12.17. see?

[dirkf]

@01bradmiller, #30839 (known issues).

[Dominic-Mayers]

I see comments referring to a 2021.12.17 version of yt-dl. In Dec 2024, Youtube-dl is still well supported in https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl . With python, zip, git and Gnu make already installed, the simplest way I found to avoid problems was to clone the youtube-dl repository using git and create my own build with make and sudo make install at the root of the repository. I had issues such as missing certificates with builds that were already created.

Note added: Of course, I first attempted to use a build of youtube-dl or ytdl from snap, pip or aptitude in Ubuntu. I added this comment, because all of them failed. The version obtained via snap install youtube-dl and the one obtained via pip install youtube-dl both failed with the message "Unable to extract uploader id". The one obtained via pip install ytdl failed with the message "youtube-dl not found". The version obtained with aptitude also failed. Also, today and yesterday the site https://yt-dl.org/ was not reachable, because its ssl certifiicate was invalid. The only thing that worked for me was to build it myself from the repository and it is very easy. I hope this can help someone else.

[a-pav]

ICYMI like I did for a long time, yt-dlp is available in many official backport repositories of debian/ubuntu for their older distro releases.
For example, in case of Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy, yt-dlp isn't available through the main official repository, but still it can be installed from the official backport repo with below command.

sudo apt install yt-dlp/jammy-backports

Newer distro releases like Ubuntu 24.04 Noble (and above) or Debian 13 Trixie (and above) don't even include youtube-dl and only have yt-dlp.

So I guess, as they say, the writing is on the wall for all of us.

[dirkf]

There's little point in installing yt-dl/yt-dlp from a distro repository, because the WWW target changes too quickly. But ffmpeg, etc, sure.

Just use the nightly build release here, or stable or nightly build of yt-dlp for extra capabilities on Py3.9+.

[a-pav]

There's little point in installing yt-dl/yt-dlp from a distro repository, because the WWW target changes too quickly.

My experience begs to differ. I'm using yt-dlp --version 2024.09.27 with absolutely no problem.

But I get your point, it's preferable if one can use the most recent version.

And yet, it's also good to know that there are more readily available options that one can probably get by for the time being.