Youtube-dlc – Download videos from YouTube or other video platforms

https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc

by theidel • 6 years ago

199 103 6 years ago

lbeltrame• 6 years ago

The repository provides no reasons that brought the need for a fork. Can someone provide additional information?

theidel11• 6 years ago

This is something I was going to address but wasn't my main focus in the beginning. But I made another write-up on reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ir8ic6/youtube...

A tiny conversation about this here as well https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/issues/56#issue...

mumblerino• 6 years ago

This feels like when I review incomprehensible code on GitHub:

Mention. it. in. the. code.

Adding a comment here and on Reddit is useless if nobody else sees it.

Explaining why a fork exists should be the first thing people read, especially how “everything is a fork” on GitHub.

theon1445• 6 years ago

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462

outadoc2• 6 years ago

Isn’t youtube-dl already updated all the time to keep up with scraping changes? I don’t understand why this would claim to be more maintained?

capableweb• 6 years ago

Seems to have been originally spawned from this discussion: "Youtube-dl is dying?" https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 citing many PRs are not getting merged.

Anecdote: youtube-dl still works for all the sites I'm using it for.

BiteCode_dev2• 6 years ago

I maintain several open source projects. Sometimes PR are not merged for years.

I'm not payed for this, I'm not even thanked for this most of the time, so I'm certainly not going to set any deadline.

But forking might be a solution, if you can give the necessary horse power for the long run.

Most can't.

dependenttypes2• 6 years ago

I find it gross that dstftw (the core youtubedl maintainer) censored the part about youtube-dlc from that issue.

theon1445• 6 years ago

Counter-anecdote: Even YouTube support is somewhat flaky (age-restricted videos, private (as in, locked behind auth) videos, random failures), and several sites I use are broken and require additional options (cookies) for even basic functionality.

Arcorann• 6 years ago

I use youtube-dl to download from Nico Nico Douga, which means having to restart the download every few minutes because the program doesn't send heartbeat requests. There's been a PR to fix this for a couple of years now [1], and a more recent updated PR to add encrypted video support [2], both of which are still open. Meanwhile, the corresponding PR on youtube-dlc [3] is actively being looked at.

[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/18230

[2] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/23824

[3] https://github.com/blackjack4494/youtube-dlc/pull/55

josteink• 6 years ago

Seems to have been originally spawned from this discussion: "Youtube-dl is dying?" https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/26462 citing many PRs are not getting merged.

As someone who has tried to contribute to YouTube-dl in the past, the absolute disinterest I received and complete lack of follow up on simple bug-fixes caused me to completely dismiss YouTube-dl as a FOSS project worthy of my time.

And I say that as someone who sends PRs to projects I’ve visited once, over tiny things like typos or lack of installation/build instructions in the readme.

Some of my PRs received a crazy all-or-nothing treatment, asking me to fix huge, long-standing bugs nobody had fixed for years, instead of accepting a 2-line diff which did a provider-specific workaround which solved a real bug, but seemingly not in the “right” way.

Completely toxic and hostile.

That someone has started a community-fork with a more welcoming and pragmatic approach does not surprise me in the least.

nonbirithm• 6 years ago

There is an issue preventing the download of Watch Later playlists that has been open for over a year. The core maintainer, dstftw, closes all reports related to it with "duplicate" while never giving a reason or the original issue. See this issue I filed for an example.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/23860

He closed it without even addressing the issue of him closing the related issues that I explicitly brought up. There are scores of issues describing the same issue, but all of them are closed, and more of them are still being submitted. This has been going on since April of last year.

It's making me realize that sometimes a fork really is the only way to get around the problem that you're not in control of the project and there are bugs that many people need to be fixed.

DarthGhandi3• 6 years ago

To nitpick: It's not scraping, the youtube.com undocumented api changes all the time, in my tinfoil view probably to mess with things like youtube-dl and 3rd party apps.

dewey3• 6 years ago

youtube-dl works for thousands of sites, most of them with web scraping. What are you nitpicking about?

lozenge• 6 years ago

YouTube supports Smart TVs, games consoles and other platforms where updating is slow or nearly impossible. Its API is stable for that reason.

malikNF• 6 years ago

Especially considering the last release to youtube-dl was just 6 days ago. Guess OP picked a bad time to post the fork.

theon1445• 6 years ago

Still sitting at 725 unmerged and/or unrejected PRs though.

danielheath• 6 years ago

Getting a fix merged to youtube-dl is quite an endeavour. No criticism to the fantastic maintainers - I encourage them to run their excellent project however suits them best - but I’m not going to try again in future.

dylan604• 6 years ago

Are PR visible to other users where they could make the same change to their local version even if the maintainer does not accept the PR in a timely manner? I know it is no where near the same, but just wondering.

iforgotpassword• 6 years ago

This seems indeed a confusing post/fork. youtube-dl is already very successful and popular. I use it almost every day.

So what is it about youtube-dlc that makes it special compared to the other 12k forks? You scroll down to the readme and it's the exact same, just that someone replaced -dl with -dlc.

jccalhoun2• 6 years ago

the submitter posted this on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/ir8ic6/youtube...

kairumination0• 6 years ago

As a casual end user of youtube-dl, I find that as long as I keep it up-to-date it is highly reliable and meets all my needs on every O.S.

mercer• 6 years ago

I built a web app that is basically a wrapper around youtube-dl. By default it downloads and audio version that I can then just open with VLC on my Android phone and listen to in the background.

It's incredible how many links I can just throw at it, and things just work. Every once in a while I need to update the binary, but I can't blame that on youtube-dl.

dewey3• 6 years ago

YouTube-dl as a name is already confusing enough because it works for so many sites and YouTube is just one of them. Why complicate it even further in your fork by renaming it to YouTube-dlc (The "c" stands for community I guess) when dlc already stands for so many other things.

theon1445• 6 years ago

I assume it's going to be hard enough for the community to know about this fork in the first place, signaling direct continuity is definitely a reason to name the fork so similarly.

Besides, Mozilla has nothing to do with Mosaic, XBMC had nothing to do with Xbox for years...

_underfl0w_• 6 years ago

Incidentally, XBMC has since rebranded as "Kodi" a fee years back.

dmos62• 6 years ago

Seconded. "youtube-dlc" might give an initial brand recognition boost from being similar to "youtube-dl", but it's the community that will make it or break it. Giving it a bad name (as argued by parent comment, and I agree) is not a good start.

theidel11• 6 years ago

I agree. Tho my main intention was backwards compatibility so that changes can easily be merged back into main project. There are also lots of people using it in their python projects. The naming discussion comes up every now and then as an issue. So for now I would like the name youtube-dlc to stay. But depending on how things go in the future I may change the name.

account42• 6 years ago

The name makes it seem more like you are attempting a hostile takeover of the project branding. Definitely not a great way to go about this.

zo12• 6 years ago

I fully support this. I know it's hard for maintainers to do stuff for free and people request too much at times. But it appears that the attitude of the original maintainers of this project are actively "hostile" and they're not willing to accept the help from additional maintainers that have contributed fixes and testing. So a fork was in order, for sure. And from the look of the comments on the issues on the fork, it seems that people are happy with the continuity and effort that is being put into the fork.

Open source can be downright hostile and unpleasant at times, so I can definitely understand the frustration. All sorts of shenanigans happen constantly.

theidel11• 6 years ago

Yes it's stressing and time demanding. But you are absolutely right about how the maintainers treat other people. At least it is open source. There are quite some closed-source projects that ran into troubles and basically disappeared. I am not sure how they will react since the fork gained some attention now. However it's not my intention to let them look bad in any kind or act like I am better. All I want is a working solution where contributions by the community are acknowledged. But my attempt to openly point that out (issue youtube-dl dying?) basically got ignored and closed.

dannyw• 6 years ago

Fantastic. This is the beauty of open source. `youtube-dl` has had quite a number of breaking issues, where fully working PRs were raised and tested but not merged for weeks and with no communication.

I am glad to see `youtube-dlc`. Please, support the self updater as well (if it is not supported already). For my archival servers, I have a cron job that updates every day, I hope I can do that with youtube-dlc too.

theidel11• 6 years ago

Yes that is exact one of the reasons why I created this fork. The self updater should hopefully work in a future release. To be honest I haven't dealt with that yet. But feel free to open an issue so it's on my TODO-list.

0-_-02• 6 years ago

A GUI-based alternative is JDownloader

trzeci2• 6 years ago

I was also using JDownloader mostly, but looks that this comment isn't popular. Is there something about JDownloader that I'm missing?

jrimbault• 6 years ago

It's not exactly the same category of software. It's a download manager, not a video extractor/scrapper.

user5994461• 6 years ago

It's dodgy software. It got acquired and got some spyware/adware/toolbars embedded. Don't trust.

Personally, I removed the older version I had, fearing it would auto upgrade and auto install malware.

It's a download manager for shared hosting sites, mostly used for downloading movies/shows/games. It can get videos from youtube, dailymotion and a hundred sites but it's not the main purpose. Users are willing to try anything to get their latest tv show, there is too much money in bundling adware to ignore. The software was great once upon a time, then it got popular, eventually the author sold out.

bane• 6 years ago

There's also a reasonable gui wrapper https://mrs0m30n3.github.io/youtube-dl-gui/#downloads

It takes a second to get how it works, but you can update youtube-dl from within the gui and it handles queues and all sorts of things really well.

wodenokoto• 6 years ago

Does curb geoblocking?

kzrdude2• 6 years ago

Youtube-dl seems to be widely used behind the scenes, for example in Mpv, right? This wasn't obvious from using mpv.

liability• 6 years ago

Yes mpv uses youtube-dl via the builtin ytdl_hook.lua script.

https://github.com/mpv-player/mpv/blob/master/player/lua/ytd...

brailsafe• 6 years ago

Seems like this is derived from a dissatisfaction with maintenance, but all I'm seeing is that they're maintaining things just fine. Yes, there are a lot of open PRs, but there are also quite a few merged, reviewed, and closed PRs. While I do support forks in the spirit of FOSS, I disagree that YT-dl is being poorly maintained and find that it continues to work well for my needs.

To the person who started the fork, what happened when you inquired about the apparent problem via email?

theidel11• 6 years ago

I wrote an email to all three core maintainers (one of them even twice) and to some of the inactive maintainers. There was no reply at all. However one reacted on github where I addressed the maintaining issues but basically just ignored it and all those who had similar concerns.

Well I am not the only one being frustrated about how things go. Especially the lack of communication. It's basically non-existent. At least the PRs that are merged are mostly either adult related or youtube. If your site is not even known to the maintainer - good luck. That will never be merged tho it may be one of the biggest sites in asia or so.

noxer2• 6 years ago

One tool that does everything. Its literally backwards. It eventually always results in one tool that's constantly broken. There should be a tool for each site if there is a maintainer who actually cares about that site.

ldarby2• 6 years ago

This is misapplying the unix philosophy. There would be too much duplicated functionality between different tools for different sites. It would be like having different versions of /bin/ls for different file systems.

ldarby2• 6 years ago

To follow on, it's a valid point though. /bin/ls can handle different file systems because many other separate people/projects are responsible for the file system specific support (in the kernel).

Youtube-dl should be architected to allow many other people to own the site-specific support (i.e. via a plugin system, with the main "distro" of yt-dl including some popular plugins, which other people or themselves are responsible for), if it was like that then probably this fork wouldn't be necessary.

noxer2• 6 years ago

"too much duplicated functionality" What should that be? Who decides when its too much anyway? No one cares about duplicated functionality in stuff they don't use. Probably 90% only want to download form YouTube. So why would they care if part of the code is used in another downloaders they don't use. If you create a kernel/OS/Distro sure you don't want duplicated functions but this is just a downloader tool. Also if there are generic functions that can be used by different tools you create a lib. No one has to reinvent the wheel. Would it cause more work if summed up? Yes most likely but the work is shared and independent.

jzer0cool• 6 years ago

Anyone know of an existing online version of this (or another website)?

theidel11• 6 years ago

there are actually quite a few that uses youtube-dl. So far I don't know if anyone uses youtube-dlc. But I already got two messages that they want to build a webapp/service using youtube-dlc.

dxxvi• 6 years ago

I'm having issues with youtube-dl and udemy (althought the Internet says it's possible. If anyone has some tip, I'll be very grateful). Does this one work with udemy?

ahmedalsudani• 6 years ago

Why not try it yourself? It’s pretty easy to clone the repo :)

ericol• 6 years ago

Try Udeler [1]. For me it has worked flawlessly since I started using it.

[1] https://github.com/FaisalUmair/udemy-downloader-gui

exabrial• 6 years ago

The first rule of YouTube DL is you don't talk about YouTube DL

rosstex• 6 years ago

The main issue I've found with youtube-dl is that "best" quality doesn't actually download the best video + audio in all cases, and might take a manual override. Not sure if youtube-dlc fixes this.

theidel11• 6 years ago

Nope. Maybe there is someone with a fix which can be merged. So far most people filter formats to their needs but that's not an option for basic users I guess..

stjohnswarts• 6 years ago

One of my favorite pieces of software :) . It definitely comes in handy when you really need to get that video

ftjyefyjw• 6 years ago

Windows Defender flags the exe as a Trojan.

Youtube-dlc – Download videos from YouTube or other video platforms

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