Download fails when using --write-srt without subtitles

[cryzed]

The video download fails entirely when there are no subtitles to be downloaded while using the "--write-srt" command-line option. Usually I use the following options by default to retrieve all the video's metadata if available:

--write-description
--write-info-json
--write-srt

This new behavior makes this impossible. I get the following error message:

[download] Downloading video #22 of 39
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] bHPlnNNMCj8: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] bHPlnNNMCj8: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] bHPlnNNMCj8: Extracting video information
[youtube] bHPlnNNMCj8: Checking available subtitles
[youtube] bHPlnNNMCj8: Looking for automatic captions
[youtube] bHPlnNNMCj8: Downloading automatic captions
ERROR: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 404: Not Found; please report this issue on GitHub.

[jaimeMF]

Ok, the problem is that we didn't set a default language for automatic capitons.
Apart from that, there are two things that I'd like to know:

1. Would you prefer not to download the automatic captions?, we could add an option for disabling them.
2. Do you expect youtube-dl to fail if there are no subtitles or automatic captions?, with the current behaviour unless you pass the --ignore-errors it will if stops if they aren't available.
   Thanks for reporting it and sorry for the problem.

[cryzed]

Regarding the first question: Yes definitely, I think the best method would be to have another command-line option for the automatic subtitles if people really want them, i.e. "--write-automatic-srt", because let's be honest, most of the time they are less than inadequate.

Regarding the second question, no, I don't really, since the version of youtube-dl I had been using until now didn't do that either. In my opinion a simple warning output would be ideal since it certainly isn't a "fatal error" that prevents the actual file (the video) from being downloaded, a bit of the metadata will simply be missing. The "--ignore-errors" option should be used to actively ignore failed video downloads in my opinion.

Thank you, and absolutely no problem.

[jaimeMF]

You are right, now it just reports warnings.
About the automatic captions, I understand your opinion, I have opened a new issue (#903) for discussion.

[jaimeMF]

@cryzed BTW --write-srt is deprecated, use --write-sub instead ( it will download them to .srt files by default)

[cryzed]

Thanks for the heads up, Jaime. I haven't been really paying attention to changing command-line arguments, I've been using youtube-dl in combination with batch-youtube-dl.py, it basically allows me to just create a batch-file.txt with the URLs to download (e.g. a playlist) and the appropriate command-line arguments, seems like I need to update some of those.

[phihag]

@cryzed That script is only useful if you have multiple batch files. In all other instances, simply calling

youtube-dl --batch-file batch-file.txt

should suffice.

[cryzed]

That is exactly what I wrote it for actually -- being able to use multiple batch-files. I have the following folder structure:

Videos/YouTube/<artist>/<playlist>/batch-file.txt

I execute the batch-youtube-dl.py script in the YouTube root folder and all my playlists will be updated. I know that I can use youtube-dl like that, thank you though.