Generic Extractor may get stuck on live streams

[ChrisK2]

Hi, it's me again (See #4003).

Since we have no way of knowing if youtube-dl can resolve an URL, we have no choice but to pass everything that looks like a web address to ytdl. This works fine most of the time, since even if our URL is a direct link to a media-file that doesn't require ytdl, the Generic Extractor will just return the URL as is.

The Problem starts however with HTTP live streams broadcasted by servers that don't support HEAD requests. In this case the Generic Extractor just starts downloading the stream ... forever.

We of course would like to avoid this somehow, since playing streams is a common use-case for mpv.

Example URL: http://ai-radio.org:8000/radio.opus

Possible solutions (in preferred order):

• Have the Generic Extractor figure out what the fetched data is early (before transfer finished)
• A way to disable the fallback when the HEAD request fails
• Have the Generic Extractor stop downloading data after X bytes or Y seconds
• A way to disable the entire Generic Extractor

[phihag]

Thank you for the report. This has been fixed in youtube-dl 2014.10.26.