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
Previous commit replaced it with shorts-filtering, use sort code
number 4 for that instead. Sort by oldest is still broken
pending reverse engineering of new ctoken format, however.
This will be much less likely to break moving forward since
YouTube rarely changes the playlist api
Videos page now includes shorts and streams in the video lsit
Also include an option to filter out shorts on the videos page
Add channel tabs to the channel template and script
Update continuation token to request different tabs
Add support for 'reelItemRenderer' format required to extract shorts
Ensures channel profile picture & description are displayed
Also ensures that videos added to a local playlist from such pages
will have the channel name included
Fixes#151
get_channel_first_page was mistakenly used when the sorting
or view is different. Must use channel_tab which generates
the necessary ctokens.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
YouTube disabled the browse_ajax endpoint. Quick fix for first
channel page. In general, this will be more robust against api
endpoint changes. As YouTube continues to change api endpoints,
at least the subscriptions and first page will no longer break.
Signed-off-by: Jesús <heckyel@hyperbola.info>
Use extract_str function since it's not always 'simpleText'
Make sure we don't output an empty error message if we don't
know what it is.
channel.py: Don't check if error message is empty, check if it's
None
These occur when too many requests are coming from a Tor exit node.
Before, there would be an error page with an exception instructing users to report the issue.
But this is an expected and persistent issue.
It was set to a fake value of 1000 previously in order to ensure there would be enough page buttons.
This was because two sequential requests are necessary (one to get the channel id corresponding to the custom url, another to get the number of videos from the "all uploaded videos" playlist, the url for which can be generated from the channel id).
Since Tor has a high latency, I thought at the time that this would be too slow, but in practice it's not too big of a deal.
Introduces cachetools dependency in order to cache the function which gets the number of videos.
The get_channel_id function has also been fixed since the ajax api seems to have been removed.
Deduplicates the code. channel_id logic was previously separate because of the need to get the number of videos and different page numbers
Also makes search work for general urls, not just channel_id urls
