Youtube_dl : ERROR : YouTube said: Unable to extract video data

Bastien

Sep 9

0 views1

I'm making a little graphic interface with Python 3 which should download a youtube video with its URL. I used the youtube_dl module for that. This is my code :

import youtube_dl # Youtube_dl is used for download the video

ydl_opt = {"outtmpl" : "/videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s", "format": "bestaudio/best"} # Here we give some advanced settings. outtmpl is used to define the path of the video that we are going to download

def operation(link):
    """
    Start the download operation
    """
    try:
        with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opt) as yd: # The method YoutubeDL() take one argument which is a dictionary for changing default settings
            video = yd.download([link]) # Start the download
        result.set("Your video has been downloaded !")
    except Exception:
        result.set("Sorry, we got an error.")

operation("https://youtube.com/watch?v=...")

When I execute my code, I get this error:

ERROR: YouTube said: Unable to extract video data

I saw here that it was because it doesn't find any video info, how can I resolve this problem?

youtube-dl youtube

python python-3-x download

1 answer

Accepted answer · original discussion

Manoj D Bhat

Dec 10

Permalink

Updating youtube-dl helped me. Depending on the way you installed it, here are the commands:

youtube-dl --update (self-update)
pip install -U youtube-dl (via python)
brew upgrade youtube-dl (macOS + homebrew)
choco upgrade youtube-dl (Windows + Chocolatey)

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3 question comments

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Minion JimPermalink

Sep 10

I just tested your code and it works except for the fact that the url is wrong. Firstly, you misspelt https (you have htps) and second it should be /watch rather than ?watch so your operation call line would become operation("https://youtube.com/watch?v=..."). I assume this is just a typo with the question, but I hope this resolves it (I could not reproduce your error)

BastienPermalink

Sep 10

Sorry it was only typing errors. It doesn't resolve the problem. I think the problem come from the windows interpreter because when I try to run my program directly in the windows command, it tells me "No module named youtube_dl" while I already installed it ...