Working on ?switch from quvi to youtube-dl, because quvi is not being maintained and youtube-dl can download a lot more stuff.

Unfortunately, youtube-dl's interface is not a good fit for git-annex, compared with quvi's interface which was a near-perfect fit. Two things git-annex relied on quvi for are a way to check if a url has embedded media without downloading the url, and a way to get the url from which the embedded media can be downloaded. Youtube-dl supports neither. Also it has some other warts that make it unncessarily hard to interface with, like not always storing the download in the location specified by --output, and sometimes crashing when downloading non-media urls (eg over my satellite internet).

I've found ways to avoid all these problems. For example, to make git annex addurl avoid unncessarily overhead of running youtube-dl in the common case of downloading some non-web-page file, I'll have it download the url content, and check if it looks like a html page. Only then will it use youtube-dl. So addurl of html pages without embedded media will get slower, but addurl of everything else will be as fast as before.

But there's an unavoidable change to addurl --relaxed. It will not check for embedded media and more, because that would make it a lot slower, since it would have to hit the network. addurl --fast will have to be used for such urls instead. I hope this behavior change won't affect workflows badly.

Today was all coding groundwork, and I just got to the point that I'm ready to have it run youtube-dl. Hope to finish it tomorrow.

Today's work was sponsored by Jake Vosloo on Patreon.