A way to download subtitles without downloading the video

[foresto]

I downloaded a video from crunchyroll only to find that the subtitles were not downloaded. It would be nice if I could now download the subtitles without having to transfer the entire video again, but I don't see any such option.

I'm testing with this page:
http://www.crunchyroll.com/yamishibai-japanese-ghost-stories/episode-2-zanbai-641889

This is on version 2014.08.05.

[naglis]

Hi, foresto,
youtube-dl should be smart enough not to download the same video again. In any case, if you do not want to download the video, you may use the --skip-download flag.

[foresto]

Hm... When I originally tried this, it did say the video had already been downloaded, and skipped re-downloading it, but it didn't download the subtitle file. I then triend --sub-lang en, and still didn't get a subtitle file. I assumed that meant youtube-dl couldn't download the subtitles alone.

After experimenting a bit more, I see that passing --write-sub downloads all the subtitles (in all languages) without the video, if the video file is in the current directory and hasn't been renamed. That's helpful. It still might be useful to have an obvious command line option for downloading just the subtitles, but I guess I can make do without it now that I see how the above behavior works.

[jaimeMF]

The subtitles behaviour in the last version should be better: with just --write-sub it will download only the english subtitles, with --sub-lang or --all-langs it will download others.

If you only want to download the subtitles just run youtube-dl 'http://www.crunchyroll.com/yamishibai-japanese-ghost-stories/episode-2-zanbai-641889' --skip-download --write-sub:

[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading webpage
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info for 360p
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info for 480p
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info for 720p
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info for 720p
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info for 1080p
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading media info for 1080p
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading subtitles for English (US)
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading subtitles for Español
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading subtitles for Español (España)
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading subtitles for Français (France)
[Crunchyroll] 641889: Downloading subtitles for Deutsch
[info] Writing video subtitles to: Yamishibai - Japanese Ghost Stories Episode 2 – Zanbai-641889.enUS.ass

It shouldn't matter if the video has already been downloaded or not.

Since I think the solution is enough, I'm closing the issue. Thanks for the report.