Youtube: unable to download video

[silverhammermba]

It hangs at "Extracting video information" and after a few minutes exits after displaying "ERROR: unable to download video". It definitely worked just a few days ago. Perhaps youtube changed something?

[phihag]

Mmm, everything is working fine for me, even from the US. Can you reproduce this issue from multiple ISPs? Also, it would be very helpful to have the full output of youtube-dl, with the -v flag. Can you post that?

[nickleefly]

I tried on windows7 64bit and ubuntu 12.04 32bit, I can open youtube video from chrome.
But when i tried to download using youtube-dl -t url, it hangs there
youtube-dl -v output is

nick at www ~/Downloads/youtube $ youtube-dl -v
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-v']
[debug] youtube-dl version 2013.05.04
[debug] Python version 2.7.3 - Linux-3.8.2-030802-generic-i686-with-Ubuntu-12.10-quantal
[debug] Proxy map: {}
Usage: youtube-dl [options] url [url...]

youtube-dl: error: you must provide at least one URL

$ youtube-dl -t https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MWH-_nJgebw
[youtube] Setting language
WARNING: unable to set language: <urlopen error [Errno 110] Connection timed out>
[youtube] MWH-_nJgebw: Downloading video webpage
ERROR: unable to download video webpage: <urlopen error [Errno 101] Network is unreachable>

BTW I am using vpn proxy, I have to use it.

[phihag]

@nickleefly I'm pretty sure your issue is unrelated, note the different error messages - @silverhammermba can download the youtube page just fine, but your download fails even there.

[nickleefly]

@phihag I guess. the error of mine is because of I am using vpn, I tried on both of my windows7 and ubuntu 12.04 machine, not sure

[silverhammermba]

I am using a different ISP than usual, but it definitely worked with this ISP a few weeks ago.

Here's the verbose output.

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['-tv', 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdTzRIOR-sY']
[debug] youtube-dl version 2013.05.01
[debug] Python version 3.3.1 - Linux-3.8.10-1-ARCH-x86_64-with-arch
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] LdTzRIOR-sY: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] LdTzRIOR-sY: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] LdTzRIOR-sY: Extracting video information
 ERROR: unable to download video
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 1252, in do_open
    h.request(req.get_method(), req.selector, req.data, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py", line 1061, in request
    self._send_request(method, url, body, headers)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py", line 1099, in _send_request
    self.endheaders(body)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py", line 1057, in endheaders
    self._send_output(message_body)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py", line 902, in _send_output
    self.send(msg)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py", line 840, in send
    self.connect()
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/http/client.py", line 818, in connect
    self.timeout, self.source_address)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/socket.py", line 435, in create_connection
    raise err
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/socket.py", line 426, in create_connection
    sock.connect(sa)
TimeoutError: [Errno 110] Connection timed out

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 682, in process_info
    success = self._do_download(filename, info_dict)
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 852, in _do_download
    data = compat_urllib_request.urlopen(request)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 160, in urlopen
    return opener.open(url, data, timeout)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 473, in open
    response = self._open(req, data)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 491, in _open
    '_open', req)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 451, in _call_chain
    result = func(*args)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 1272, in http_open
    return self.do_open(http.client.HTTPConnection, req)
  File "/usr/lib/python3.3/urllib/request.py", line 1255, in do_open
    raise URLError(err)
urllib.error.URLError: <urlopen error [Errno 110] Connection timed out>

During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 707, in download
    videos = self.extract_info(url)
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 477, in extract_info
    results.append(self.process_ie_result(ie_result, download))
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 507, in process_ie_result
    self.process_info(ie_result)
  File "/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/FileDownloader.py", line 684, in process_info
    raise UnavailableVideoError()
youtube_dl.utils.UnavailableVideoError

[phihag]

This is a network issue, unrelated to youtube-dl - when youtube-dl tries to contact the actual server (you can get it with --get-url). Most likely, this is either an outage of youtube (in which case it should be temporary), or a problem with a firewall of some kind. Can you provide a pcap dump? Can you ping the server you get with --get-url? If I'm right, using a different connection should fix the problem. Try

youtube-dl LdTzRIOR-sY --proxy ytdl-proxy.phihag.de:3128

[silverhammermba]

Indeed! Using the proxy worked.

[phihag]

Great, so you can wait for youtube to fix their issues, or contact your ISP to finally resolve this. I'm closing this issue now, but feel free to comment if there's anything thatyoutube-dl could do to improve the situation.