youtube-dl: “--skip download” cancels out “--download-archive” (non-video material)

[SillyScribe95]

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SO question (link here):

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/57168566/youtube-dl-skip-download-cancels-out-download-archive-non-video-materi

trying to download a Youtube playlist's json metadata (NOT VIDEOs):

--skip download ignores video downloads, just giving the .json info

--download-archive archive.txt saves a URL list of previously downloaded videos from this playlist to archive.txt, and skips over them if I run the youtube-dl command again.

However, including --skip download in the commands results in URLs of each video not being added to archive.txt, which suggests yt-dl only counts videos as extracted metadata and no . Are the two commands able to run together in any format/order or is this a bug?

EXAMPLE CODE:

youtube-dl -i --write-info-json --skip-download --download-archive __archive___.txt < PLAYLIST >

[remitamine]

--download-archive FILE          Download only videos not listed in the
                                 archive file. Record the IDs of all
                                 downloaded videos in it.

Record the IDs of all downloaded videos in it.

[SillyScribe95]

I made reference to this in the original post with "previously downloaded videos"; apologies if that wasn't clear.

Just checking if there's a command equivalent to --download-archive for non-video metadata, or could it be appropriated for such purposes?

[remitamine]

no, there is no such option.

[TomArrow]

I would also like this option if possible. I'm trying to download all descriptions from a channel, but many videos are restricted and due to DNS issues it skips random ones, so I have to sit through thousands of download attempts hoping it will get them all eventually.

[akaleeroy]

Please consider adding this option. I downloaded GBs worth of videos only to realise the playlist was ongoing. Renamed the files into something sane, so the only option now to continue where I left off is using a --download-archive log file. I'm not about to waste that much bandwidth on re-downloading just to produce the log.

The format for the --download-archive log file is

youtube AdL9Yd0lB_k
youtube YxBZbzIXNTg
youtube qsE_XxfFQ0w
youtube AdL9Yd0lB_k
...

As a workaround one could use youtube-dl --get-id <channel/playlist url> >> archive.log then prepend youtube to each line.