Also dl File Description Text

[rg3]

Was: http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/issue/162/

Would it be possible to download the File Description (Uploaders Comment) also and store it into a file named like the video with the extension txt or so?

[rg3]

No such a feature is currently planned, but I'll leave the issue open in case anyone is willing to submit a patch for it.

[v01d-cypher]

I will have a look at implementing this.

[Cightline]

Hey rg3 is this the right spot to find the comments?:
"video_webpage = urllib2.urlopen(request).read()"

[orospakr]

I've noticed that --get-description exists, but appears to get a truncated version. I hacked it in my own copy to print out the description text, truncated as it is, along with the URL so I can match 'em with the videos I downloaded in a separate run.

Also, it forces --silent and --simulate on.

[phihag]

youtube-dl returns the shortened title for youtube links because it parses <meta name="content"> with regular expressions. Instead, it should parse the document with an HTML parser (or fake on by removing <scripts> and then using an XML parser) and search for <p id="eow-description">, and return the textual contents of that element.

[orospakr]

I wonder if the YouTube Data API at all useful for this...

[phihag]

Retrieving the description over the Data API is trivial, but we'd have to request the web page anyway since the Data API does not give us the URL of the video. Also, we'd have to deal with a number of corner cases (authentication, age-restricted) twice then. Fortunately, HTML parsing in Python is really easy - if you have at least Python 2.6 (or lxml installed).

I implemented full youtube description retrieval in my fork (which also includes blip.tv support). You can also apply the diff.

[update:] Additionally, I added a --write-description flag. Set it to have a .description file written along with the video file itself. (diff)

I'd love to hear your feedback - does it work for you?

[phihag]

Implemented with --write-description.

[morbus]

@phihag: The --write-description was merged in, but it doesn't look like your revised "eow-description" lookup made it in. Worth reopening the issue for that? Was just something I was about to look into doing myself. [EDIT: Nevermind, looks like I was wrong. Now to figure out why I'm not getting the full description.]