YouTube: no maxresdefault thumb anymore?

[MacDada]

• I've verified and I assure that I'm running youtube-dl 2017.09.02
• At least skimmed through the README, most notably the FAQ and BUGS sections
• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones
• Bug report (encountered problems with youtube-dl)

I'm gonna repeat my issue from here: #14079 (comment)

It's marked as duplicate, but i searched all issues with maxresdefault and found nothing.

$ youtube-dl --version
2017.08.27.1
$ youtube-dl -j https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V7oiro8tYA4 | grep -Po '"thumbnail":.*?[^\\]",'
WARNING: unable to extract uploader nickname
"thumbnail": "https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V7oiro8tYA4/default.jpg",

youtube-dl now returns a default thumb: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V7oiro8tYA4/default.jpg

I'm quite sure it used to return maxresdefault thumb: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/V7oiro8tYA4/maxresdefault.jpg

Question: is it going to be "fixed" and youtube-dl will return maxresdefault thumbs or should I generate thumb urls by myself, without the use of youtube-dl for that matter?

[MacDada]

nvm, with 2017.09.02 it's back to maxresdefault again ;)

[KingMob]

I wouldn't say it's invalid just yet, since we're still seeing the issue on a decent fraction of our requests.

It may be related to missing VideoObject schemas, since if youtube-dl can't find <span itemprop="thumbnail"...>, the backup thumbnail methods only find the low-res thumbs. It could also be the disable_polymer=true query param, since without it, the Youtube web page doesn't have the VideoObject schema on it.

I wonder if it's related to the intermittency issues or choice of DNS servers as mentioned in the comments of #11270.

[victornpb]

I'm getting 120x90 thumbnails here