Scrape YouTube Video Comments

[Avbrella]

I'm archiving a YouTube channel, and a comment was made by the person running it that he's had to change two video series' audio in the past to comply with a copyright claim. On the older of the videos, the view count was too high to change the audio without a re-upload, and the re-uploading resulted in the loss of the old comments, view counts, likes, etc.

Can youtube-dl be expected to scrape YouTube comments in the future? A "re-download comments if they've changed" option would also be useful.

[phihag]

At the moment, there is no such functionality, but I'l leave this issue open as a feature request.

Please bear in mind that this is the youtube-dl's project issue tracker though. Do not post here when you are looking for a solution outside of youtube-dl.

[Avbrella]

When I find a solution outside youtube-dl, I will stop using youtube-dl then. Hostility towards competition gets people nowhere.

[phihag]

I am sorry, my intention was not to be hostile, but to prevent the issue tracker from going off-topic. We do have quite heavy traffic already, and want to concentrate on improving youtube-dl. If you want to discuss non-youtube-dl solutions, you are very welcome to do so at other places, for example stackoverflow. We youtube-dl developers will likely be there as well!

I had the experience that leniency towards off-topic discussions can quickly lead to an unusable bug tracker, where it becomes hard to spot the actual issues with the software we're developing.