File time stamps incorrect

[ghost]

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Description of your issue, suggested solution and other information

Running below command to download 300+ videos from a YouTube channel. First 100 or something had the accurate file modified dates. Matching the date the videos were uploaded the channel. But the remaining files are dated today (day of download). Not sure what happened along the day. Any ideas? Running the command on Mac el-Capitan.

youtube-dl --download-archive downloaded.txt -ixv --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 8 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" ytuser:enyay

[dstftw]

Modify date is not set from video upload date but according to Last-Modified HTTP header. If any final file is dated today than this is what is returned by Last-Modified header.

[ghost]

OK that's good to know but it doesn't really help address the issue. If I re-download the video individually, Last-Modified date is displayed properly. Say a video from Aug 2013. But like I said if I attempt to batch download videos, somewhere in the middle, something happens and Last-Modifed returns the date & time of the download.

[yan12125]

Did you use the timestamp for some sorting tasks? I suggest --xattrs or --add-metadata instead, which is more reliable than file modification time.
By the way, seems there's a bug in --xattrs. According to http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/, it's recommended to use ISO8601 format for the date field:

Recommended best practice is to use an encoding scheme, such as the W3CDTF profile of ISO 8601 [W3CDTF].

However, the current implementation uses upload_date. A change seems necessary. If some video does not have a timestamp field but only upload_date, we can use a fixed time in a day. For example, 2016/08/12 => 2016-08-12T00:00:00.

[ghost]

Yes I would like to preserve the time stamps so I can sort and categorize files accordingly. Could you please provide an example on how to do what you suggested with --add-metadata?

[yan12125]

Sorry for the late response. In general the following command should work:

youtube-dl --download-archive downloaded.txt -ixv --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 8 -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" ytuser:enyay --add-metadata

However, on my machine the written metadata is overwritten by following format conversions. I'm not sure whether it's a problem of ffmpeg or youtube-dl. Does this command work for you?

[ghost]

Doesn't work :( First video gets downloaded is from Aug 1st but the Date Modified of the mp3 file shows today's date unfortunately.

[yan12125]

--add-metadata does not change the modified date, but the metadata of media files, which are part of the file content. Those metadata can be viewed with ffprobe xxx.mp3. It shows nothing for me, though.

[Deses]

Four years later and this is still happening. Exact same behaviour. Download first 100 or so files? No problem, after a while it starts putting the current date and if I redownload it it works OK again.

There's something definitely wrong when batch downloading a lot of stuff.

@dstftw this should be reopened, IMHO.