nytimes: text overlays

[bentley]

Consider this video from the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001733041/the-program.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9-3K3rkPRE

Downloading from the NYTimes site with youtube-dl (no flags) gives a .mov of the whole video. But there are portions where the screen doesn’t have any text, even though the YouTube version has text in the video stream (00:05, 00:21, 00:45, 00:53, 01:48, 02:38, 02:48, 03:20, 03:30, 04:00, 04:06, 04:21, 05:27, 06:44, 07:52…). They should contain text, but they don’t.

Presumably the NYTimes website has some subtitle/text layer that is overlaid on the video when it is played in their web player. I don’t have access to a browser that can access it, so I can’t say for sure.

[dstftw]

This is format related. By default in browser they stream not the best quality available. For me it's -f video_xxl_bb_mm, and this media contains aforementioned text that is missing in the best mov quality youtube-dl downloads by default.
You can play around with -F flag and try different formats to download best quality with text.