youtube-dl alternative

[crispyjones]

I, as well as many other users, have recently noticed issues with youtube-dl downloads from youtube (but not many other sites) being massively throttled. I only noticed very recently when running it directly from the command line. This is obviously a youtube-dl issue and not a FFAStrans problem. https://www.reddit.com/r/youtubedl/comm ... _are_slow/ The solution most people are using is to move to this fork of youtube-dl https://github.com/yt-dlp called yt-dlp. Youtube-dl has not been updated since June, I have no inside information on either the parent or fork as to their long term viability. Just want to put out there that, currently, there appears to be a more active and better functioning version of youtube-dl that could be worth exploring if the original youtube-dl does end up abandoned.

[crispyjones]

As a test I simply renamed the yt-dlp executable to youtube-dl.exe and replaced the one in the /processors/ffmpeg directory and it worked. At least my simple youtube download>transcode>deliver workflow functioned without issue. The speed increase was great, back to the way it used to be. A 9 minute youtube video took 35 minutes with the original youtube-dl.exe and only 4 minutes using yt-dlp.exe.

2021-11-23 19_44_54-localhost_3002_webinterface_2.png (17.61 KiB) Viewed 13249 times

[emcodem]

Very nice stuff Mr. Jones, also very interesting that the youtube-dl guys stopped commiting but new issues are still being answered. I'll just post that question in issues section of the original github repo, let's see what they say...

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/30267

[emcodem]

Or i could have searched throught their history and learn that the main guy of youtube-dl is currently off and everyone switches to yt-dlp.
Short internal discussion made us conclude that we should just switch as well. Thanks for the heads up!

[crispyjones]

That's very interesting, it's too bad he didn't hand the project off to someone. Luckily github deals with this "key man risk" situation quite well with forks. Happy to test whatever changes you make and happy Thanksgiving!

[admin]

Hi crispyjones,

Would you like to help us by testing various combinations of the inbuilt "YouTube" node options? That would be very much appreciated!
And of course we already appreciate very much what you have already investigated in this matter.

Also, I made the topic sticky until 1.3 is out. This version will of course have this new yt-dlp inbuilt if it turns out to be the proper solution.

Again, thanks!

-steinar

[crispyjones]

Happy to help. Test things like audio only downloads and various qualities? Would you like me to continue using the test system I built with the renamed yt-dlp.exe file?

[emcodem]

As steinar is currently off, i'll give my best...
Yeah, continuing with the system where you just replaced our youtube-dl against the new one by renaming would be exactly what i would do.
Also, we'd need to test all the inputs that the youtube "decoder" processor currently has, so everything you see on the processor UI. The reason is that all inputs map directly to the youtube-dl comandline.

Of course, if you can just test a subset, just let us know what you did so we dont need to spend much time at it anymore

Happy thanksgiving too!

[crispyjones]

I selected various video formats in the drop down from Best down to 360. If the video was available in the selected format it downloaded it, if not it picked the closest thing, no errors. I checked and unchecked the tick boxes, no issues or errors. I both used and did not use a config file, this was a bit of a problem as most of the default command switches sent by FFAStrans (like --no-playlist) do everything I would normally put in there. I eventually found that adding --keep-video did indeed result in the intermediate files ending up in working directory/yt folder. Even stuff I put in there that didn't work (like changing file naming) didn't cause any issues. I did not test the user/pass windows as I doubt any sites that need that would work through our firewall . Tested audio only and video only and both behaved as expected. After going through how FFAStrans talks to youtube-dl along with all my testing I felt safe enough to deploy this on our production server. This will get a lot more use with more varieties of sites and I will report back next week if anything crops up. EDIT: Also confirmed that running youtube-dl.exe -U works, so the automated daily updates should work.

[admin]

Great work, thanks a lot!
Just let us know if you run into any issues in prod.

-steinar