Is the --write-annotations option working as intended?

[libransser]

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Question

Hi, I'm downloading some YouTube videos to archive them and I'm wondering if the --write-annotations option is working as intended. For example, if you visit the following YouTube video in a browser using the desktop version of the site you can see an icon in the top right corner of the video, it's a letter "i" in a circle:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9CI6KSV560

If you click on that icon, a list of links appears. For this particular video it contains a link to another video of the same channel, two playlists of the same channel, and a link to another channel. If I open the Settings menu in the video (the gear icon) and turn the switch "Annotations" off then the icon disappears, telling me that those are the annotations.

However, whenever I use the --write-annotations option the resulting file written (extension annotations.xml) doesn't include any of the links that appear in that icon. I have downloaded close to 1,000 videos and none of the annotations.xml files include any additional links.

Is this really working as expected? Does the --write-annotations option actually refer to the deprecated YouTube annotations? Or I'm missing something? If so, how can I download those links?

I'm using the latest version of youtube-dl, the 2020.01.24 version, and for a large portion of the videos already downloaded I also used the previous version to that one.

[remitamine]

those are video cards and not part of the annotations file.

[libransser]

I see. Is there any way to download video cards then?

[remitamine]

no, Youtube does not offer a URL to download cards, but you can extract the information about the cards from player_response on the video page(you have to write your own script).