Does Youtube-DL have a way to check if a page is compatible?

[nickyost]

YouTube-DL has a LOT of supported sites, which is great! But if I'm building an application to utilize some of them, is there any way for me to use YouTube-DL as a "catch all"?

Example command:

youtube-dl https://www.videovendor.com/video/title_of_video/1234 --is-compatible

This would yield "Yes" or "No" (in JSON or XML) depending on whether it was compatible.

I think this may be possible to do this with "--write-info-json" and maybe check the format of that, but can we count on consistency with this? If we can, I can then load the same file so it doesn't have to hit the endpoint more than once.

Thanks!

[jaimeMF]

You can do youtube-dl URL -j and check the exit code, it will be 0 on success and other value if it's not supported. But it will aslo return a non 0 value for other errors, for example if the video is blocked in the country.

[dbr]

Using YoutubeDL via a simple Python script, you could check all of the info extractors to see if there is a dedicated extractor for the given URL - which would avoid having to contact the remote URL at all:

import youtube_dl
def supported(url):
    ies = youtube_dl.extractor.gen_extractors()
    for ie in ies:
        if ie.suitable(url) and ie.IE_NAME != 'generic':
            # Site has dedicated extractor
            return True
    return False

print supported("http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc") # True
print supported("http://www.google.com/bad_example_of_unsupported_site") # False

Not as thorough as actually running youtube-dl [...] -j to dump out the video information, but much quicker because it's just a regex-match on the URL which might be preferable in certain circumstances

[phihag]

Since I remember this question being asked at least twice before, I've added an FAQ entry that explains why using @dbr's code snippet is not a good idea.

You can just call youtube-dl with -j (or equivalently, --write-info-json --skip-download). If you get any results, the URL is supported. If you don't, it's not.