Animelab Extractor Downloads Mismatched Audio/Video By Default

I’m pretty surprised that yt-dlp has an extractor that supports AnimeLab, of all things, but I’ve encountered an issue with it.

When using yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt https://www.animelab.com/player/wonder-egg-priority-episode-1/subtitles, it tries to download bestaudio+bestvideo, which works successfully…however, it downloads the hardsubbed video (i.e. meant for Japanese audio) and pairs it up with the English audio - even when adding the “/subtitles” segment to the URL. I end up with an episode that has hardcoded English subtitles that are mismatched with the Japanese audio.

Why Animelab decided to hardcode the subtitles, when even Funimation doesn’t, I have no idea…

In order to download the episode with matching video/audio, you first have to issue a yt-dlp -F https://www.animelab.com/player/wonder-egg-priority-episode-1/subtitles command and find the format IDs that match, then issue a yt-dlp -f 91268_nothardsubbed_en-5+184694_yeshardsubbed_ja-JP-audio-ENGLISH https://www.animelab.com/player/wonder-egg-priority-episode-1/subtitles command.

This isn’t so bad in the grand scheme of things, but it does make the ability to download an entire series with one command (yt-dlp --cookies cookies.txt https://www.animelab.com/shows/wonder-egg-priority) effectively useless.

My use case is that I need the non-hardcoded subs video with Japanese audio, and I’ll then insert Japanese subtitles into the video, however, if I was able to get either the subbed or dubbed version of an episode/series by default, that would be good enough.

[AnimeLab] Downloading login page
[AnimeLab] wonder-egg-priority-episode-2: Downloading URL https://www.animelab.com/player/wonder-egg-priority-episode-2/subtitles
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading m3u8 information
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading m3u8 information
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading MPD manifest
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading MPD manifest
[AnimeLab] wonder-egg-priority-episode-2: Downloading URL https://www.animelab.com/player/wonder-egg-priority-episode-2/dubbed
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading m3u8 information
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading m3u8 information
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading MPD manifest
[AnimeLab] 58821: Downloading MPD manifest
[info] 58821: Downloading 1 format(s): 185047_yeshardsubbed_ja-JP-5+192363_nothardsubbed_en-0
[download] Destination: Wonder Egg Priority - Episode 2 - The Terms of Friendship.f185047_yeshardsubbed_ja-JP-5.mp4
[download]   0.2% of 408.07MiB at  3.45MiB/s ETA 02:09

I’m using the latest release.

[LunaGNUisance]

Hey, as @pukkandan mentioned I am the original author of the extractor. I never expected this extractor to be merged in with a fork sweat_smile but I’m glad it has found some use. Indeed it is a shame that the default mismatches video and audio, but luckily my extractor is… verbose enough with the formats that you can somehow wrangle it to be good. I might be able to fix this however I won’t be able to work on it for the foreseeable future. So if someone else is willing to take on the challenge of fixing my code, feel free smile

I can’t work on the code myself, but I would like to comment on how extremely effective this extractor is. It has an entire series downloaded in less than 5 minutes - for reference, the Crunchyroll extractor takes closer to 10 minutes, depending on the series, to finish downloading an episode. Of course, I’m sure that has something to do with the way Animelab serves its content, but it’s been working really well for me for the past two days I’ve used it.

Thanks for writing it!

[LunaGNUisance]

@pukkandan This can be closed. Animelab has been permanently shut down and absorbed into FUNimation (which as of last month is being slowly absorbed into Crunchyroll). The Animelab site will redirect you to FUNimation to login, and doesn’t do any streaming anymore.

https://blog.funimation.com/2021/11/02/a-new-anime-era-begins-as-animelab-retires-on-9-december-2021/