Which title does --get-title retrieve?

[joeschmoe40]

I note that the "-j" (json data) option shows that there are actually 3 titles ("title", "full title" and "stifle"). From what I can tell, all 3 of these seem to have the same value.

I'm curious; which ones of these is returned when you use the --get-title option?

[phihag]

Good question. We actually output title until 2013.11.22, but will switch to fulltitle in the next version. All of these are automatically generated from extractors that just give us a generic title.

• fulltitle is the uncut title, whatever the service is giving us. It may be very long. If you want to have a database of YouTube titles, use this one.
• title is the title that most programs want to use. It goes into the default filename and is short enough so that a filename containing it is actually legal on most filesystems. As you have seen, for virtually all titles it is identical to fulltitle. At the moment, the limit is 200 characters, but that may be reduced or extended in the future.
• stitle is deprecated. For a time, it stood for "safetitle" and did not contain "problematic" characters such as slashes. Since we have long moved filename-safety to where it belongs - namely the filename determination - this fields is not required any more. We may remove it, but for now it's there to support ancient invocations.