--max-downloads issues

[SilentGob]

When I started using the --max-downloads option I expected it to limit the number of actually downloaded files. I was wrong :)

I'm using this option with --match-title option and --max-downloads are counting all files not only the ones matching the REGEXP. So I ended with less than --max-downloads files on my harddrive.

Is it possible to only increment the counter when a file is actually downloaded ? (maybe it will raises an issue with simulate, I'm not familiar enough with the code)

One other "issue" is that when you reach max-downloads youtube-dl keeps running even if it is never going to download another file. Instead of only writing a message saying "max-downloads reached" why not stop youtube-dl ?

[phihag]

Wow, the new option gets used quickly. Checking --max-downloads after matching the title is reasonable (and moving the download increment out of the IE is a great idea anyways), and I'll leave this issue open for that.

On the other hand, terminating youtube-dl is not that easy. Note that any solution must work even if youtube-dl is used as a library by another hosting program. Therefore, we can't just call sys.exit or so. Raising an exception is possible, but would complicate the API.

[phihag]

If you want --max-downloads to skip any further videos, you'll likely have large playlists. In these cases, simply specify --playlistend 42 to get only part of the playlist. I'm not certain that --max-downloads is really that useful in the first place, and there won't be any API changes to accommodate it (Why do you want to use it?).

[SilentGob]

Not counting unmatched videos is fine for me.

For the record, limiting playlist size with playlistend may not work in my case.
I was looking to get a fixed number of files from a playlist, and in this playlist I only want files matching a specific name format. As the playlist can be quite spammed with non matching files using playlistend can be difficult.

Anyway your solution fits me well for now, and if I absolutely want max-downloads, I can still make a quick and dirty hack :)

Thank you for your reactivity anyway!

[phihag]

After careful deliberation, we raise a MaxDownloadsReached exception starting with youtube-dl 2011-12-8. This can significantly speed up the process if the number of videos is large.