Failure to extract player url for a youtube video

[gl-yziquel]

Checklist

• [ x] I'm reporting a broken site support
• [ x] I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
• [ x] I've checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
• [ x] I've checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
• [ x] I've searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

Verbose log

mini-me@virtucon ~/h/l/cinema> youtube-dl --verbose 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ogt-q956I'
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: ['--verbose', 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ogt-q956I']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out utf-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
[debug] Single file build
[debug] Python 3.10.12 (CPython x86_64 64bit) - Linux-6.2.0-1010-nvidia-x86_64-with-glibc2.35 - OpenSSL 3.0.2 15 Mar 2022 - glibc 2.35
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 4.4.2, ffprobe 4.4.2
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube] r0Ogt-q956I: Downloading webpage
[youtube] r0Ogt-q956I: Downloading API JSON
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
WARNING: unable to extract player URL; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
ERROR: No video formats found; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/home/mini-me/home/hut/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 859, in wrapper
    return func(self, *args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/mini-me/home/hut/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 955, in __extract_info
    ie_result = ie.extract(url)
  File "/home/mini-me/home/hut/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 565, in extract
    ie_result = self._real_extract(url)
  File "/home/mini-me/home/hut/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 2128, in _real_extract
    self._sort_formats(formats)
  File "/home/mini-me/home/hut/youtube-dl/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 1444, in _sort_formats
    raise ExtractorError('No video formats found')
youtube_dl.utils.ExtractorError: No video formats found; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type  youtube-dl -U  to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

Description

This situation occurs for youtube-dl built from source revision 00ef748cc0e35ee60efd0f7a00e373ab8d1af86b.

As far as I could hunt down things, youtube-dl attempts to download https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0Ogt-q956I&bpctr=9999999999&has_verified=1 from the function _request_webpage which is invoked (with some levels of indirection) from _real_extract. In extractor/youtube.py, line 1602, in function _extract_player_url, there is the r'"(?:PLAYER_JS_URL|jsUrl)"\s*:\s*"([^"]+)"' regexp that is matched against the webpage whose url is given above, and nothing is found. It may therefore be a change in the contents of that webpage that induces this behaviour. I can unfortunately not go into debugging that without more background knowledge of what youtube precisely does and how it may or may not have changed recently. The _extract_player_url function is called in a loop on line 2034 of extractor/youtube.py and, because of this parsing failure, that loop is exited early, and the formats variable is never populated on line 2076 with the video formats. Hence the reported error.

[dirkf]

[x] I've searched the bugtracker for similar issues including closed ones

Actually doing that would have saved you the debugging. Review #30839.

[gl-yziquel]

I've spent a whole morning looking for a similar issue. Debugging happened faster and more methodically than searching for a needle in a haystack. And I still do not know how to solve that issue. I'll spend another morning tomorrow. Or in a week.

[gl-yziquel]

Duplicate from this one, perhaps ? #32499

It would perhaps make sense to attempt to link such issues with this error message in the youtube-dl cli app itself.

[gl-yziquel]

The yt-dlp repo gets around this issue.

https:/yt-dlp/yt-dlp