Specifying file format should download correct video

[kevinburke]

The first time I tried to download a video I ran youtube-dl with the -F flag and got this list of options:

35  :   flv [480x854]
44  :   webm    [480x854]
34  :   flv [360x640]
18  :   mp4 [360x640]
43  :   webm    [360x640]
5   :   flv [240x400]

I then tried running youtube-dl -f mp4 and got the following message:

ERROR: requested format not available

Which seems odd because it was just shown in the list above.

I'd like to propose one of the following two options:

1. Accept a video format like flv or mp4 as an argument to -f

If there's only one specified resolution for the file format it's easy to choose which one to download. Otherwise, choose the same resolution you would without passing any options to the function.

2. Show a better error message

If the user specifies a format that's also a value in self._video_extensions, tell them they should try an integer instead and show the list of integers and video resolutions they should try.

Would be happy to submit a pull request, just curious about what you think the interface should look like.

Kevin

[tomxtobin]

I'm puzzled, too, as to why there isn't a simple "download the best quality version of format X" option, instead of needing to specify numerical codes.

I work around it with the following shell script which I've called youtube-mp4, which always grabs the best available MP4 file:

#!/bin/sh
youtube-dl -f $(youtube-dl -F $1 | grep -E 'mp4' -m 1 | grep -E '^[0-9]+' -o) $1

You could generalize the script to accept a format parameter, but I'm only ever interested in MP4.

[jaimeMF]

This has been supported for some time. Currently 'mp4', 'flv', 'webm', '3gp', 'm4a', 'mp3', 'ogg', 'aac' and 'wav' are supported. Thanks for the report!

If you find some common extension that is not recognized, feel free to open a new issue or submit a PR.