- Remove yt-dlp entirely (modules, routes, settings, dependency)
Was blocking page loads by running synchronously in gevent
- Fix captions: use Android client caption URLs (no PO Token needed)
instead of web timedtext URLs that YouTube now blocks
- Fix 429 retry: fail immediately without Tor (same IP = pointless retry)
Was causing ~27s delays with exponential backoff
- Accept ytdlp_enabled as legacy setting to avoid warning on startup
Videos without hq720.jpg thumbnails caused mass 404 errors.
Now preserves the actual thumbnail URL from YouTube's API response,
falls back to hqdefault.jpg only when no thumbnail is provided.
Also picks highest quality thumbnail from API (thumbnails[-1])
and adds progressive fallback for subscription/download functions.
Major Features:
- HD video thumbnails (hq720.jpg) with automatic fallback to lower qualities
- HD channel avatars (240x240 instead of 88x88)
- YouTube 2024+ lockupViewModel support for channel playlists
- youtubei/v1/browse API integration for channel playlist tabs
- yt-dlp integration for multi-language audio and subtitles
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed undefined `abort` import in playlist.py
- Fixed undefined functions in proto.py (encode_varint, bytes_to_hex, succinct_encode)
- Fixed missing `traceback` import in proto_debug.py
- Fixed blurry playlist thumbnails using default.jpg instead of HD versions
- Fixed channel playlists page using deprecated pbj=1 format
Improvements:
- Automatic thumbnail fallback system (hq720 → sddefault → hqdefault → mqdefault → default)
- JavaScript thumbnail_fallback() handler for 404 errors
- Better thumbnail quality across all pages (watch, channel, playlist, subscriptions)
- Consistent HD avatar display for all channel items
- Settings system automatically adds new settings without breaking user config
Files Modified:
- youtube/watch.py - HD thumbnails for related videos and playlist items
- youtube/channel.py - HD thumbnails for channel playlists, youtubei API integration
- youtube/playlist.py - HD thumbnails, fixed abort import
- youtube/util.py - HD thumbnail URLs, avatar HD upgrade, prefix_url improvements
- youtube/comments.py - HD video thumbnail
- youtube/subscriptions.py - HD thumbnails, fixed abort import
- youtube/yt_data_extract/common.py - lockupViewModel support, extract_lockup_view_model_info()
- youtube/yt_data_extract/everything_else.py - HD playlist thumbnails
- youtube/proto.py - Fixed undefined function references
- youtube/proto_debug.py - Added traceback import
- youtube/static/js/common.js - thumbnail_fallback() handler
- youtube/templates/*.html - Added onerror handlers for thumbnail fallback
- youtube/version.py - Bump to v0.4.0
Technical Details:
- All thumbnail URLs now use hq720.jpg (1280x720) when available
- Fallback handled client-side via JavaScript onerror handler
- Server-side avatar upgrade via regex in util.prefix_url()
- lockupViewModel parser extracts contentType, metadata, and first_video_id
- Channel playlist tabs now use youtubei/v1/browse instead of deprecated pbj=1
- Settings version system ensures backward compatibility
Bug:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/rusian/yt-local/youtube/comments.py", line 180, in video_comments
post_process_comments_info(comments_info)
File "/home/rusian/yt-local/youtube/comments.py", line 81, in post_process_comments_info
comment['author'] = strip_non_ascii(comment['author'])
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
File "/home/rusian/yt-local/youtube/util.py", line 843, in strip_non_ascii
stripped = (c for c in string if 0 < ord(c) < 127)
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: 'NoneType' object is not iterable
During handling of the above exception, another exception occurred:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "src/gevent/greenlet.py", line 900, in gevent._gevent_cgreenlet.Greenlet.run
File "/home/rusian/yt-local/youtube/comments.py", line 195, in video_comments
comments_info['error'] = 'YouTube blocked the request. IP address: %s' % e.ip
^^^^
AttributeError: 'TypeError' object has no attribute 'ip'
2025-03-08T01:25:47Z <Greenlet at 0x7f251e5279c0: video_comments('hcm55lU9knw', 0, lc='')> failed with AttributeError
tests/test_util.py: 14 warnings
/home/runner/work/yt-local/youtube-local/youtube/util.py:321: DeprecationWarning: HTTPResponse.getheader() is deprecated and will be removed in urllib3 v2.1.0. Instead use HTTPResponse.headers.get(name, default).
response.getheader('Content-Encoding', default='identity'))
Sometimes YouTube redirects to a google.com/sorry page, seemingly
setting up redirect loops. Other times the url redirects
to itself.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
watch_comment api periodically gives the error "Top level
comments mweb servlet is turned down."
The continuation items for the new api are in a different
arrangement in the json, so changes were necessary to the
extract_items function.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
New 429 captcha page doesn't have IP. This new page appears to
match the 429 code plus the json of {"redirect": ...} which would
be occasionally received when the pbj json endpoint was used in
the past.
Closes#22
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
Info parsing is handled by yt_data_extract, and html
post-processing is done with util.prefix_urls and
util.add_extra_html_info
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
The request can be retried immediately after the first
new identity, but if we do more new identities, we have to wait
for at least 6 seconds before doing the request, otherwise
it won't be done on a new ip based on my experiments.
Potential issue: If after getting third new identity, request
takes > 12 seconds (since timeout is 15) and returns 429, then the
Tor Manager will let it do a 4th try instead of giving up (meaning
request is taking forever from user's perspective).
Should be a very rare occurence however.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
