Clarifying the marformed stream error message

[marmistrz]

Currently, if a video stream is malformed, a warning is issued and the user is asked to install ffmpeg
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/54009c246e8eed38cfa8dc3eecb5619c1c81a1f2/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py#L1962

The warning should state, what the command to fix it should be. Sometimes we want to use computers with high-network bandwidth to download the video and fix it, if needed, on our computers with root access, where we can install arbitrary software, such as ffmpeg or avconv.

Alternatively, the docs should say more about it - currently searching for malform in the readme and the manpage returns nothing.

[dstftw]

How "command to fix" will look like depends on your environment. Current message gives you well enough information of what you should do.

[marmistrz]

Honestly, I don't know what it means more than "the stream is broken". Using the search engine to find "how to fix a malformed stream using avconv" yields nothing valuable.

I could possibly just copy-paste the args from here [1], but an average user won't dig through the sources to find out, which commands are the ones to use...

Even some ffmpeg warnings are much more clearer, more or less

Malformed AAC bitstream detected: use audio bitstream filter 'aac_adtstoasc' to fix it

whatever the aac_adtstoasc filter is.

[1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/d2ae7e24e5c574fa45621771a134e58b21443e5f/youtube_dl/postprocessor/ffmpeg.py#L544

[dstftw]

You don't need to do anything yourself. You only need to have ffmpeg installed. That's what an average used should do.

[marmistrz]

@dstftw what if you don't have root access?

[dstftw]

You don't need root access.

[marmistrz]

Installing packages via the package-manager needs root access, compiling ffmpeg/avconv from sources is much too much for an average user. And some systems don't even have it in their repos, e.g. CentOS.

[dstftw]

You don't need to install it per se. You only need ffmpeg to be in $PATH.

[marmistrz]

Ok, I didn't notice that ffmpeg has static builds available. That's a rarity in the Linux world.