youtube-dl alternative

[crispyjones]

I haven't had any issues running this on my production server. One more positive thing of note, yt-dlp released a new version yesterday and I checked today and FFAStrans automatically updated from version 2021.11.10.1 to the 2021.12.01 without issue. The new version continues to run fine.

One thing that would be helpful, if a new youtube-dl node is in the works, is to expose the actual URL to emcodem's webUI. Currently you can only see the name of the shortcut dropped into the folder in the job info view, not the actual URL that youtube-dl is downloading (because it's in a text file). I've created a workflow branch that uses a com executor to search the workflow working dir for the url.txt file and read its contents to a variable, but it's a bit kludgey.

[emcodem]

Aye crispy,
added that to the todo list, as it is a no-brainer i assume it should hit the next release.

Ride on!

[Kwantumm]

Hello there,

Short time lurker here. Like many people on the interwebs I have noticed that the old youtube-dl stopped working almost completely since yesterday..
Which brought me to this thread and I am very greatful for the work already done! I applied the trick by @crispyjones and most of my transcodes are now
working according to plan and back to regular speed as well. Great!
There is one job that doesn't work though, namely Audio Extraction. Funny thing is it doesn't even give an error message. Nothing happens.

For completeness here are the jobs that do work:
transcode to h264 .mp4 at 8mbit
transcode to XDCAM 50i (50mbit 422, 8 ch mono audio, MXF wrapper)
transcode to XDCAM 25p(50mbit 422, 8 ch mono audio, MXF wrapper)

Hope this helps and do tell me if I need to be more specific.

A little bit of background about myself;
I work for a large Post Production company in the Netherlands and collegues of mine have already been using FFAStrans for various things. I am only just dipping my toes in on the technical side of things. ( mainly because I have the most time available at the moment and the guy who set it up for us is leaving the company at the end of the week ).
I hope to learn a lot in the coming weeks by first starting out to analyse and modify existing workflows and later by copying bits of code and adapting it to my own needs. Hopefully at some point I'll even be able to do some coding myself!

Thank you @emcodem, @admin et al.

[emcodem]

@Kwantumm
aye, well thats a nice start in the forum from you:D
So welcome to here and thank you so much for using FFAStrans, glad to have you with us.

I hope you enjoy your first steps with FFAStrans, it can be a little bit overwhelming when you have no experience with similar systems. My tipp would be to work through the example series, they are designed to give you a quickstart: viewtopic.php?f=5&t=849&p=4486&hilit=beginners#p4486

Also, if you work a lot with the youtube downloader, you might be interested to look into my sugesstion to use the "addtoany" chrome extension, viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1067&p=5116&hilit=addtoany#p5094

There is one job that doesn't work though, namely Audio Extraction. Funny thing is it doesn't even give an error message. Nothing happens.

Are you under the impression that this problem is connected to switching from youtube-dl to ytdlp?

[Kwantumm]

@emcodem

Yes, so far I'm finding it very interesting!
My only experience so far had been in using FFAtrans with workflows made by other people in the same way that I have used other encoding software like Vantage, Media Encoder etc. etc. as an enduser so this indeed has a bit more of a learning curve.

Thanks for the links. I'll definitely go through them!

Are you under the impression that this problem is connected to switching from youtube-dl to ytdlp?

Yes indeed. The thing is that it was working before. Like last month or so.
When I tried on wednesday still on youtube-dl all my attempts to do an audio extraction came back with the following error:
Signature extraction failed: Traceback (most recent call last)
This prompted me to investigate wether or not the other youtube-dl based workflows were working only to find that they were not and that this was apparently due to a recent change at YouTube.
Then after finding out about ytdlp and installing it on our system all but the audio extraction was working again. But now I don't even get an error message. It's like ytdlp doesn't even get started when I drop a file in the watchfolder.

[emcodem]

@Kwantumm
might you share one affected workflow please?

[Kwantumm]

Hmmm,

It seems to be more complicated than I thought.
I have a sneaking suspicion that it might have to do with drm or copyrightflags or something.
Just converted two YT links succesfully to WAV. But the link I was testing with yesterday still doesn't get picked up.
Again, it will convert to .MXF but refuses to do anything with .WAV, very strange.
So I think I'll just have to resign myself to having to convert certain links in two passes. Media Encoder will convert my MXF just fine to WAV.
Or just use one of the many online services for this specific use case.

[Kwantumm]

@emcodem

might you share one affected workflow please?

Here is the url; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFNEQ9ybrGI

YouTube RIP_ WAVE audio.json

(5.69 KiB) Downloaded 175 times

But seeing as anything else I've just tried seems to be working fine I do think it is some kind of copyright issue.

[emcodem]

Hm, i just downloaded the latest ytdl release, your workflow worked for me.

Code: Select all

youtube-dl.exe --version
2021.12.17

[Kwantumm]

Wow, interesting!

Will give this a shot on monday. Thanks for your efforts @emcodem ! Have a good weekend!