--prefer-free-formats doesn't seem to be working on youtube anymore

[danwdart]

When recently I've used --prefer-free-formats for any Youtube video it returns me an mp4 instead of a webm which it used to.

Has something changed recently?

Cheers

Dan

[phihag]

Please post the output of youtube-dl with the -v option - --prefer-free-formats works fine for me. Note that YouTube's serving of high-quality video formats has become flaky over the last week, so the mp4 you're getting may just be the highest quality video there is. If you really want only webm, simply add --format webm.

[danwdart]

With -v:

$ /var/www/projectchaplin/application/../external/youtube-dl -v --prefer-free-formats -o '%(id)s.%(ext)s' -- 'QcCLaxFTZ-U'
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v', '--prefer-free-formats', '-o', '%(id)s.%(ext)s', '--', 'QcCLaxFTZ-U']
[debug] youtube-dl version 2013.05.14
[debug] Python version 2.7.5+ - Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64-with-debian-jessie-sid
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] QcCLaxFTZ-U: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] QcCLaxFTZ-U: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] QcCLaxFTZ-U: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: QcCLaxFTZ-U.mp4
[download] 100.0% of 32.07MiB at 6.06MiB/s ETA 00:00

It's saved mp4.

WebM isn't actually available for a lot of the newer videos, apparently:
$ /var/www/projectchaplin/application/../external/youtube-dl -v --format webm -o '%(id)s.%(ext)s' -- 'QcCLaxFTZ-U'
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v', '--format', 'webm', '-o', '%(id)s.%(ext)s', '--', 'QcCLaxFTZ-U']
[debug] youtube-dl version 2013.05.14
[debug] Python version 2.7.5+ - Linux-3.2.0-4-amd64-x86_64-with-debian-jessie-sid
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] QcCLaxFTZ-U: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] QcCLaxFTZ-U: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] QcCLaxFTZ-U: Extracting video information
ERROR: requested format not available
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/var/www/projectchaplin/application/../external/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/init.py", line 556, in _real_main
cwd=os.path.dirname(os.path.abspath(file)))
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 709, in init
errread, errwrite)
File "/usr/lib/python2.7/subprocess.py", line 1326, in _execute_child
raise child_exception
OSError: [Errno 20] Not a directory: '/var/www/projectchaplin/external/youtube-dl/youtube_dl'
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/var/www/projectchaplin/application/../external/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 461, in extract_info
ie_result = ie.extract(url)
File "/var/www/projectchaplin/application/../external/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/InfoExtractors.py", line 96, in extract
return self._real_extract(url)
File "/var/www/projectchaplin/application/../external/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/InfoExtractors.py", line 649, in _real_extract
raise ExtractorError(u'requested format not available')
ExtractorError: requested format not available

And youtube-dl returns 1.

[danwdart]

I guess the only option would be to pipe it through ffmpeg afterwards. Shame about that.
Thanks anyway