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pythonyoutube-dl

Why is youtube-dl still downloading video with 'keepvideo':False?

I'm trying to download just the thumbnail of a video and it does download the thumbnail but the video also downloads afterwards. I'm using this code:

 thumbnail = folder + video["title"]
    tn_options={
    'format':'bestvideo',
    'keepvideo':False,
    'writethumbnail':'writethumbnail',
    'outtmpl':thumbnail,}
    
    with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(tn_options) as ydl:
        ydl.download([video['webpage_url']])

I assumed that setting keepvideo to False would prevent downloading the video as I've used it in the past but it's not working in this case.

Solution

  • The option to not download any video is called skip_download. It would be like the following:

    thumbnail = folder + video["title"]
tn_options={
  'format': 'bestvideo',
  'skip_download': True,
  'writethumbnail': 'writethumbnail',
  'outtmpl': thumbnail,
}

with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(tn_options) as ydl:
  ydl.download([video['webpage_url']])

    keepvideo is a post-processing video-only flag. If True it means that it would keep the original video besides the post-processed one after finished.

    From the docs:

    Keep the video file on disk after the post-processing; the video is erased by default.