Dumping to `stdout` is broken for version `2015.04.26`

[cipriancraciun]

As the subject says, if one tries to dump to stdout a video whose ID starts with an underscore (_), youtube-dl instead tries to save it to disk.

youtube-dl --output - -- 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KYvp8PrCFc'

[yan12125]

Maybe you need to specify the best format. E.g.

youtube-dl -f best --output - 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_KYvp8PrCFc'

[cipriancraciun]

I think I've found the issue: with the latest version (2015.04.26) it seems the option to write to stdout is broken (i.e. --output -).

I've downgraded to 2015.04.09 and it seems to be working now.

[jaimeMF]

as @yan12125 said you have to use -f best, because when ffmpeg/avconv is installed youtube-dl now defaults to -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best which gives a better quality video. bestvideo+bestaudio doesn't currently support being dump to stdout, and with a naive approach the two files would need to be downloaded first, that's not what you want when reading from stdout. If you really need to output to stdout bestvideo+bestaudio feel free to open a new issue.