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
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>
Because of the new ctoken methodology for getting comment replies,
the more comments button automatically works inside the comment
reply thread when there are more replies than the limit (250).
This commit also updates the max_replies for that ctoken so the
next 250 replies will be retrieved for the more comments ctoken.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
Comment reply protobuf now requires the channel id of the uploader
of the video. Otherwise the endpoint returns 500.
Instead of making the protobuf ourselves and passing this data
around through query parameters, just use the ctoken provided to us
but modify the max_replies field from 10 to 250.
Fixes#53
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
The issue that code was working around happened with an older
request format (the ajax format) that was removed. The issue
does not happen with the newer polymer format.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
- Actually using it will result in comments being shadowbanned,
even those posted from Youtube's interfacs, because your account
gets downranked since no analytics are present so it looks like a
bot posting the comment.
- It's been broken for awhile
for instance, urls that start with // become https://
adjustment required in comments.py because the url was left as a
relative url in yt_data_extract by mistake and was using URL_ORIGIN
prefix as fix.
see #31
Specifically, fix failures when any of the fields from the parsed
comment are None, such as author, author_url, etc.
(failure due to string concatenation when building urls).
author_id (an internal sql-like integer previously required for deleting and editing comments) has been removed by Youtube and is no longer required.
Remove it for simplicity.
Rename author_channel_id to author_id for consistency with other extraction attributes.
extract_items returned None for items instead of [] for empty continuation responses. Fixes that.
