Configuring youtube-dl to use Python 3.4 instead of 2.7

[AmperAndSand]

I have both Python 3.4 and Python 2.7 installed (both are the 64-bit versions on Windows 7). I've already set the PY_PYTHON environment variable to 3 (i.e. py.exe should run Python 3 by default, unless specified to run Python 2).py.exe --version gives an output of Python 3.4.3.

However, when I run youtube-dl, I get a [debug] Python version 2.7.8 - Windows-7-6.1.7601-SP1 message. The reason I would like to use Python 3 is to get around the bug where output filenames have non-ASCII, Unicode characters stripped, which happens in Python 2.

[jaimeMF]

I guess that you are using the youtube-dl.exe version, that file is built with py2exe and includes its own copy of the python 2.7 interpreter and as far as I know there's no easy way to make it use python 3. If you have a normal python 3.4 installation you can just run pip install -U youtube_dl.

[AmperAndSand]

@jaimeMF That worked. Thank you.

[reggna]

Or, if you're still using Ubuntu 14.4 where Python 2 is still predominant, you can run this:

pip3 install -U youtube_dl
python3 `which youtube-dl`

[lorenaceballos]

orena@lorena-To-be-filled-by-O-E-M:~$ pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl
Collecting youtube-dl
Downloading https://files.pythonhosted.org/packages/ad/1f/ae3e500935979bec629bab80be8b6fea00f7d5e8cb29564cf0f9c5afe975/youtube_dl-2019.4.30-py2.py3-none-any.whl (1.8MB)
|████████████████████████████████| 1.8MB 1.1MB/s
Installing collected packages: youtube-dl
Found existing installation: youtube-dl 2018.3.14
ERROR: Cannot uninstall 'youtube-dl'. It is a distutils installed project and thus we cannot accurately determine which files belong to it which would lead to only a partial uninstall.

pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl

[gamersalpha]

Hello not working :'(