Failure to extract audio

[phihag]

youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 -w -t 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IewZCdCTqnY'

(only available from US)

Output:

 [WARNING] : error running ffmpeg

This may be a problem with the mp3 codecs or ffmpeg version.

[phihag]

The problem seems to be missing mp3 encoders. Adding the debian multimedia repository and installing lame should solve it. Nevertheless, youtube-dl should include ffmpeg's error message in the output.

[wolkenarchitekt]

I had the same problem. I'm running Ubuntu 11.04, with ffmpeg, Lame and all other Codecs one can imagine. Still, extracting audio does not work (but on some videos it actually did work...).
As a workaround, I'm saving the FLVs only, and get the Audio out of them manually with ffmpeg, like this:
ffmpeg -i infile.flv -vn -f wav outfile.wav
Works fine and the quality is good.

[phihag]

@ifischer Great idea! youtube-dl now supports the output format wav which should work everywhere. You can also specify the audio format best, which will not recode the audio at all.

Additionally, as of 2011.12.18 (oops, messed up the date, but who said that version numbers must match the release date?), youtube-dl outputs the ffmpeg error message, which should greatly help diagnosing the problem.