URLs of deleted videos

[vronizor]

Make sure you are using the latest version: run youtube-dl --version and ensure your version is 2018.10.05. If it's not, read this FAQ entry and update. Issues with outdated version will be rejected.

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• Searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones
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Description of your issue, suggested solution and other information

Hi youtube-dl community. I'm in the process of writing a script to download the audio files from my music playlists and keep them updated on my computer with minimal manual work. Thanks to youtube-dl it's taking shape nicely. However, I'm having an issue with deleted videos. I am aware of the --ignore-errors and --no-warnings commands and use them already to bypass deleted videos and complete the download of playlists. Nevertheless, I would like to be able to retrieve these deleted videos' URL in order to manually look them up and eventually find a replacement video (or at least keep track of them).

When visiting playlists on the YouTube website, the URL of the video is available (see for example https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JCUPc9zVfyo, a deleted video but still an "active" YouTube page). Thus, would there be a way to extract these URLs nonetheless and "tag them" in a special way (for example with a "ERR" code next to the URL when using the --download-archive option, which for now just skips the deleted videos and doesn't write their URLs) in order to manually process them later?

Thanks again to the community for the great work, cheers.

[dstftw]

Embed youtube-dl as python module and work with API directly. All this is covered in FAQ.