ERROR: content too short - ISSUE

[szunyi]

Hello

My biggest problem about youtube-dl is the "ERROR: content too short"
[ youtube-dl is up-to-date (2013.05.07) ]

I use youtube-dl only for Youtube.
Mostly i get the error, when the download speed is getting low.
I have a 80/80 internet on my server so the problem is not belongs to me.

I tried the -R feature, but not working on these situation :(

Is anybody can describe the problem and/or fix this error?

Thanks!

[phihag]

This happens when youtube is still in the process of pushing the video out, or is experiencing filesystem failure. In any case, we should indeed retry before giving up.

[szunyi]

I think this issue (or protection?) belongs to youtube, because video download from twitch.tv is always good.
.. And the filesystem is good, because i can download from twitch ~40-50MiB/s! (hostgator)

[phihag]

No, I mean youtube's internal (distributed) filesystem.

[szunyi]

oh okay
as i know currently youtube-dl dont have solution for this problem -> autoresume or autoretry

[ghost]

yes. would be just great to add automatic autorestart on unexpected end of content.

[mg94c18]

For me this worked:
Create a simple batch file, name it youtube-dl-retry.bat, with following four lines in the file:

if [%1]==[] echo URL missing & goto :EOF
:retry
youtube-dl.py %1
if ERRORLEVEL 1 goto retry

Then, invoke it with URL to download with quotes, like this: youtube-dl-retry.bat "your URL within quotes"

If the "ERROR: content too short" happens, the tool will return error code and batch file will retry. If download completes successfully, error code will be zero and the batch file will complete.

[Plaque-fcc]

Hi!

As usual, another wrapper:

#!/bin/bash

until youtube-dl ${options_list}; do
sleep 2s;
done;

— and it tries on and on whatever error it encounters.

[phihag]

Well, these wrappers work, but are just workarounds (and nasty ones, you could run into an infinite loop if the error is not recoverable from). We should really just retry on content not short errors.

[szunyi]

true, we need a working built-in feature

[Plaque-fcc]

A wget-like retries count for a single entry on this error?

[FiloSottile]

Should be easy to use the same technique I use in test_download.py for this.

[leesei]

On bash I'm using this loop

        RESULT=1
        until [[ ${RESULT} -eq 0 ]]; do
            youtube-dl.py ${OPTIONS} ${URL}
            RESULT=$?
        done

#507 is a related PR, isn't it?

[kebera]

i am getting this content too short error only since last week and on some videos in this one channel (unlike many other channels i tried which work well) :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T5K2DBA5g80
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HOE8PwduSCI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f72jNhdSPPs

[helpdeskdan]

get_fash_videos does the same thing. In my experience, it seems to do it only on flv's, as if the server sees that the download speed is too fast to be real flash. Try a non flv container, like 22 or 18 and see if that helps. All I can say is that it worked for me!

[kebera]

On 13-09-26 01:40 AM, helpdeskdan wrote:

get_fash_videos does the same thing. In my experience, it seems to do it
only on flv's, as if sees that the dl speed is too fast to be flash. Try
a non flv container, like 22 or 18 and see if that helps. All I can say
is that it worked for me!

already have that setting:

-f 46/45/44/43/38/37/22/18

[helpdeskdan]

I was able to down load those videos with that -f setting with no issue. Also, I am unable to recreate my issue tonight; it seems to be gone. I second the theory of the problem being youtube's.

[ocisly]

@phihag flagging to close

[dogancelik]

I keep getting this error when downloading a batch of videos.
I'm not sure if it's related but I'm using -f bestaudio argument.
It would be nice if there was a way to retry instead of exiting program. (without using batch/bash)

[joepie91]

What's the status on this? There's a --retries parameter anyway, but it seems to (still) be ignored completely for 'content too short' errors.

[dstftw]

Duplicate of #809.