NA started to appear in upload_date, release_date and timestamp for BBC World News

[adamryczkowski]

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2017.04.17

Before submitting an issue make sure you have:

• At least skimmed through README and most notably FAQ and BUGS sections
• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

What is the purpose of your issue?

• Bug report (encountered problems with youtube-dl)
• Site support request (request for adding support for a new site)
• Feature request (request for a new functionality)
• Question
• Other

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If the purpose of this issue is a bug report, site support request or you are not completely sure provide the full verbose output as follows:

$/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl -c http://www.bbc.com/news/10462520 -o "%(upload_date)s %(timestamp)s %(title)s (%(id)s).mp4" --verbose

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-c', 'http://www.bbc.com/news/10462520', '-o', '%(upload_date)s %(timestamp)s %(title)s (%(id)s).mp4', '--verbose']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2017.04.17
[debug] Python version 3.5.2 - Linux-4.4.0-72-generic-x86_64-with-Ubuntu-16.04-xenial
[debug] exe versions: avconv 2.8.11-0ubuntu0.16.04.1, avprobe 2.8.11-0ubuntu0.16.04.1, ffmpeg 2.8.11-0ubuntu0.16.04.1, ffprobe 2.8.11-0ubuntu0.16.04.1
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[bbc] 10462520: Downloading webpage
[bbc] p050ds2n: Downloading media selection XML
[bbc] p050ds2n: Downloading m3u8 information
[download] Downloading playlist: One-minute World News
[bbc] playlist One-minute World News: Collected 1 video ids (downloading 1 of them)
[download] Downloading video 1 of 1
[debug] Invoking downloader on 'http://cp401491-vh.akamaihd.net/i/mps_h264_hi/public/news_bulletins/news_heads_world/1279000/1279640_h264_1500k.mp4/index_0_av.m3u8'
[hlsnative] Downloading m3u8 manifest
[hlsnative] Total fragments: 7
[download] Destination: NA NA One-Minute World News (p050ds2n).mp4
[download] 100% of 11.71MiB in 05:14
[debug] avconv command line: avprobe -show_streams 'file:NA NA One-Minute World News (p050ds2n).mp4'
[ffmpeg] Fixing malformated aac bitstream in "NA NA One-Minute World News (p050ds2n).mp4"
[debug] ffmpeg command line: avconv -y -i 'file:NA NA One-Minute World News (p050ds2n).mp4' -c copy -f mp4 -bsf:a aac_adtstoasc 'file:NA NA One-Minute World News (p050ds2n).temp.mp4'
[download] Finished downloading playlist: One-minute World News

---

I used to have video names that included the release_date and the timestamp for the same invocation of the youtube-dl, like this: 20170405 1491377662 One-Minute World News (p04z39pp).mp4

If that information is still available from the web scraper/parser, I would be grateful if you reintroduced it.

[vvasuki]

Having installed the latest version with sudo pip install git+https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/@master -U , so that

youtube-dl --version
2017.09.24

I still face the problem on the vArtAvalI playlist:

youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 -o "vArtAvalI-upl-%(release_date)s-%(title)s.%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXWm_pm03_Y
[youtube] mXWm_pm03_Y: Downloading webpage
[youtube] mXWm_pm03_Y: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] mXWm_pm03_Y: Extracting video information
[youtube] mXWm_pm03_Y: Downloading MPD manifest
[download] Resuming download at byte 1657925
[download] Destination: vArtAvalI-upl-NA-Vaartavali - Weekly Sanskrit Magazine _ 23_09_2017.m4a
[download]   7.6% of 23.43MiB at 59.89KiB/s ETA 06:10^C

Could you reopen and fix?

PS: upload_date works fine: youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 -o "vArtAvalI-upl-%(upload_date)s-%(title)s.%(ext)s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXWm_pm03_Y

[dstftw]

Youtube videos have no release date.

[vvasuki]

Thank you for clarifying.

Separately: It might be useful to include sudo pip install git+https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/@master -U in the readme as well so that folks can easily get the bleeding edge version of the tool

[vvasuki]

Also, it might be a good idea to fix the man page to include the fact that Youtube videos have no release date. It currently reads:

· release_date (string): The date (YYYYMMDD) when the video was released

[dstftw]

And if you bother to read it further it reads:

Note that some of the sequences are not guaranteed to be present since they depend on the metadata obtained by a particular extractor. Such sequences will be replaced with NA.

[vvasuki]

I did read that - but did not deduce that this applies to YouTube. It feels that being more explicit would avoid futile attempts by users..

[dstftw]

There are about 1k extractors apart from YouTube. It's technically infeasible and pointless to try documenting every meta field availability for every extractor.

[vvasuki]

Ah - I didn't realize that. Would it be possible to make youtube-dl print all valid tags that can be extracted from a given website? (Or has it already been proposed and implemented?)

[dstftw]

There is no such thing as tags that can be extracted from a particular website as it depends on extraction of a particular URL and can't be guessed beforehand.