[QUESTION] How to interrupt a running youtube-dl thread, using embedded python

[waldner]

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I'm using the youtube_dl Python module as explained here. It works fine stand-alone, however I now want to connect a simple graphical progress indicator to it, so I'm running the widget and youtube_dl in separate threads. The widget will have a progress indicator and a "stop" button. The progress indicator is updated when my progress_hook is called. However, I'm looking for a way to tell the youtube_dl thread to terminate (gracefully or not, whatever) when the user clicks the "stop" button. The command-line version of youtube_dl just catches KeyboardInterrupt and terminates, but I've found no documentation on how to do this cleanly (if there's a way at all) when using the embedded module.

Since the progress_hook seems to be the only place where user code can do something, I was thinking of setting a "stop" flag from the main thread and checking it in the youtube_dl thread when the progress_hook is called, and if it's set then calling sys.exit() in the youtube_dl thread to terminate. Is there a better way?

Thanks.

[yasoob]

I am also interested in this question. Would love to see an "official" way to handle interruption.

[edsu]

I was hoping it might be possible somehow to terminate the download from a progress hook, since every Downloader subclass calls Downloader._hook_progress at certain intervals during the download. But it doesn't seem possible, even if you have an instance of the YoutubeDL object in a closure, because as you say, there's no way to signal the downloader to stop?

[edsu]

I guess one potentially messy solution would be to sart youtube-dl in a separate process using multiprocessing and then kill that process as needed when some condition occurs?

[Ripeey]

Just raise a valueError inside progress callback function (works if callback is actively called and no subprocess involved i.e no live streams :/)

[ganego]

Just raise a valueError inside prog callback func

Could you please explain what you mean?
I now have the same problem and running ytdl via multiprocessing just to be able to terminate it when it's downloading a stream (mp4 will be destroyed on crash) seems kinda clunky for a Python program.

Hm even if I run it via multiprocessing, ytdl spawns ffmpeg to download the stream and this continues running in a separate process without python.

[Ripeey]

Just raise a valueError inside prog callback func

Could you please explain what you mean?
I now have the same problem and running ytdl via multiprocessing just to be able to terminate it when it's downloading a stream (mp4 will be destroyed on crash) seems kinda clunky for a Python program.

Hm even if I run it via multiprocessing, ytdl spawns ffmpeg to download the stream and this continues running in a separate process without python.

well true, it just does in a separate process in ffmpeg to download live stream and as explained here why "q" doesn't work and we have to use ctrl+c and seems like theres no other native way to stop it and even callback hooks gets called at the end so the only way to do is send a SIGINT signal to the process. (ugly way)