(Somewhat OT) Issues with viewing/downloading from YouTube (Other sites work fine)

[joeschmoe40]

So, I wrote this script to access, view, and, optionally, d/l vids from YouTube and other sites (i.e., anything site that youtube-dl supports). It runs under OSX, and is built around the following tools:

1. youtube-dl
2. jq
3. VLC (Mac OSX version)
4. wget

Basically, I use "youtube-dl -j" to translate the short URL into the long URL, jq to parse the JSON output to get the "long URL", VLC to view it, and finally, wget to d/l it (if I like it).

This all works fine on other sites, but on YouTube itself, as of sometime in the past few months, two problems arise:

1. VLC always fails to display the vid, with a typically unhelpful error message like "Failed to access: https://..."
2. wget tries to download it, but fails with a message like:

Resolving r3---sn-hp57knly.googlevideo.com... 173.194.17.89, 2607:f8b0:4008:3::9
Connecting to r3---sn-hp57knly.googlevideo.com|173.194.17.89|:443... connected.
ERROR: cannot verify r3---sn-hp57knly.googlevideo.com's certificate, issued by /C=US/O=Google Inc/CN=Google Internet Authority G2': Unable to locally verify the issuer's authority. ERROR: certificate common name*.c.docs.google.com' doesn't match requested host name r3---sn-hp57knly.googlevideo.com'. To connect to r3---sn-hp57knly.googlevideo.com insecurely, use--no-check-certificate'.

Note: If I manually re-try this, supplying "--no-check-certificate", then it does, indeed, work.

So, it boils down to: VLC won't play it, wget will download it, but only with --no-check-certificate.

What can I do?

P.S. The exact youtube-dl command I am using is:

youtube-dl.py --prefer-insecure --skip-download --write-info-json --write-description -o tmptmp "$url"

which creates a file called tmptmp.info.json, which I then parse with "jq".

[jaimeMF]

This a problem with the certificates (we are getting some similar reports), can those videos be downloaded with youtube-dl itself?

(Note that --prefer-insecure doesn't do anythin for youtube videos, they only use https on their website now)

[joeschmoe40]

Yes, direct downloading via youtube-dl works.
So, the real question remaining is: Why does VLC fail?

P.S. The URL I am using for testing is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJkxFhFRFDA

[jaimeMF]

It works with VLC and wget on OSX for me, maybe the SSL support is not properly configured (I don't know how to fix it).

[joeschmoe40]

It's probably version-of-VLC related. VLC has a nasty habit of changing stuff (removing features) from version to version, so I try to avoid "upgrading" unless it is absolutely necessary.

Therefore, I'm running a fairly old version of VLC -> VLC media player 2.0.7 Twoflower (revision 2.0.7-3-g51f7bb4). When I find something that works, I stick with it. But I would imagine that version might not support the latest https: foo.

[jaimeMF]

Since youtube-dl works fine, I'm closing the issue.