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YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

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Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#301
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not easy because it's an command line. Not a single family member would touch this here. It's sad but understandable.

> It's not easy because it's an command line. > Not a single family member would touch this here. > It's sad but understandable. I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath. In the case of t…

> youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM).

Are you sure that this is true? Starting many updates ago, but continuing into the present (I just updated to 2016.04.06 to be sure), I encountered a weird situation where

    $ ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
fails but

    $ ./youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE
works. I have no problem with the second working, but don't understand why the first fails. It seems to be fine for other video services; only YouTube requires this URL-processing step.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#304
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not easy because it's an command line. > Not a single family member would touch this here. > It's sad but understandable. I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath. In the case of t…

> youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM). Are you sure that this is true? Starting many updates ago, but continuing into the present (I just updated to 2016.04.06 to be sure), I encountered a weird situation where $ ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE fails but $ ./youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE works. I have no problem with the second workin…

    $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading webpage
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading video info webpage
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Extracting video information
    [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading MPD manifest
    WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv.
    [download] Destination: True Detective - My Least Favorite Life - Lera Lynn Scene-wbKJt1NQtZE.f136.mp4
    [download]  19.3% of 35.60MiB at  1.51MiB/s ETA 00:18
Seems to work for me. I always double-quote the parameter anyway (I never trust the shell to handle my strings...)

I just tried `youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE` and that works too. I didn't know the "v" parameter could be given like that!

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#305
post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults too; e.g. "youtube-dl https://......" will Just Work (TM). Are you sure that this is true? Starting many updates ago, but continuing into the present (I just updated to 2016.04.06 to be sure), I encountered a weird situation where $ ./youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE fails but $ ./youtube-dl wbKJt1NQtZE works. I have no problem with the second workin…

$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading webpage [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading video info webpage [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Extracting video information [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading MPD manifest WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv. [download] Destination: True Detective - My Least Favorite Life - Lera Lynn Scene-w…

Very strange. Perhaps it's some setup- or platform-dependent thing; I will file an issue. Thanks for checking!

EDIT: Very strange; I thought I'd give a try to what seemed a throwaway comment in your post, about quoting the string, and that fixed it. Thanks!

Without the double quotes (which seemed to be unnecessary for you), I still get:

    $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
    Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

    youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.
    Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.
I guess that some alias is grabbing some part of the URL string.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#306
post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always the same argument, and still wrong. It depends 100% on the desirability of the expected result. I have seen a non-IT guy do an incredibly complex serie of super user operations on his PC just to install CS. He was very motivated. But if you asked him to install Chrome in place of IE he would even understand what it meant. Same: many people still use peer-to-peer software to download movies, mostly porn. I gues…

> I guess it is better now but for a long time you had to do some port forwarding Nothing has changed for me. Did I miss something ?

Back when I was at LimeWire, circa 2005, we attempted to use UPnP to have LW configure port forwarding for you. Though, maybe some router vendors consider UPnP a security risk these days.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#307
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results. Lot's of open source projects come up top of the results when you search for stuff because of this fact.

>SEO rigging? That's mostly having links from other reputable sources. If this software is good, other good sites will link to it rising it up in the search results. This is a myth perpetrated by Google and it's entirely false. The fact is that if you aren't actively engaged in spa--err, SEO--, you will be outgamed and crushed by anyone moderately competent at spa-- err, "internet marketing". I make a point of replyi…

Did you actually approach the media, authorities in the niche, Techcrunch, etc?

Because you can't just rely on 'on site' SEO to succeed. Adding a bunch of content on your own site is good, but what's really needed is to get authorities elsewhere to link to it. So you need to get good at marketing/PR, in the sense of talking to people with popular sites and social media channels.

You can do a ton of stuff on your own site, but it's irrelevant if you're not being linked to or mentioned elsewhere. And one good link from say, the New York Times or BBC or some other popular site is worth a ton more than a thousand spam links from low quality domains.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#309
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not easy because it's an command line. > Not a single family member would touch this here. > It's sad but understandable. I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath. In the case of t…

I'm curious. So you think, this may work as an argument? You think that if I tell my parents this, they'll suddenly start using the command line? Let me tell you how it works now: I've installed a download addon for them. Because they have no idea and before they install crap, I'll do it for them. I did not explain anything nor did I tell them that I did install that addon. They automatically clicked the red "downloa…

> You think that if I tell my parents this, they'll suddenly start using the command line?

Probably not, but that doesn't really matter as it was never the intention (if it were, there's probably a better place to write it than Hacker News).

I was offering software developers a perspective which demonstrates that the GUI/CLI distinction is mostly artificial, and that a CLI doesn't automatically mean "hard to use". After all, as others have pointed out, people managed just fine on DOS back in the day (where "managed just fine" == "shouting at machine for not doing things right", just like today).

> This is userfriendly and easy.

I don't like applying the phrase "userfriendly" to a piece of software, as it depends just as much on the user.

For example, I'm a user of youtube-dl, and I find it incredibly userfriendly: when I use it in scripts, I just write "youtube-dl" followed by flags for the appropriate behaviour. In contrast, your solution sounds really unfriendly to me. First my script would need to open a browser, and since the downloader is part of an addon, I wouldn't be able to use PhantomJS like I usually would. Instead, I'd probably have to go off and learn Selenium, assuming that Selenium drivers can use browser addons? If not, I might have to write a custom XUL app (not done that in a while!), and make sure it's compatible with the addon. Does XUL even work on a headless machine (in my case, RaspberryPi with SSH access)?

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#310
post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading webpage [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading video info webpage [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Extracting video information [youtube] wbKJt1NQtZE: Downloading MPD manifest WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv. [download] Destination: True Detective - My Least Favorite Life - Lera Lynn Scene-w…

Very strange. Perhaps it's some setup- or platform-dependent thing; I will file an issue. Thanks for checking! EDIT: Very strange; I thought I'd give a try to what seemed a throwaway comment in your post, about quoting the string, and that fixed it. Thanks! Without the double quotes (which seemed to be unnecessary for you), I still get: $ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE Usage: youtube-dl [OPTIO…

It's possible your shell has some kind of regular expression magic enabled that is eating the '?' and the '=' characters:

  $ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=wbKJt1NQtZE
  youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
  
  $ echo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
  zsh: no matches found: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbKJt1NQtZE
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