[BUG] Missing video(s) in channel download on YouTube

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This YouTube channel (https://www.youtube.com/user/ChildrenofPoseidon2) has 3 videos, but youtube-dl only finds 2 videos.

Command: youtube-dl -s -v https://www.youtube.com/user/ChildrenofPoseidon2

Log output:

[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []
[debug] Command-line args: [u'https://www.youtube.com/user/ChildrenofPoseidon2', u'-s', u'-v']
[debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out UTF-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2018.04.16
[debug] Python version 2.7.10 (CPython) - Darwin-17.5.0-x86_64-i386-64bit
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 3.4.2, ffprobe 3.4.2
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube:user] ChildrenofPoseidon2: Downloading channel page
[youtube:playlist] UUyQUl9M6OfRX7EKhi8SPN_A: Downloading webpage
[download] Downloading playlist: Uploads from Jeffabel and Friends Extras
[youtube:playlist] playlist Uploads from Jeffabel and Friends Extras: Downloading 2 videos
[download] Downloading video 1 of 2
[youtube] 55DF8tRSMco: Downloading webpage
[youtube] 55DF8tRSMco: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 55DF8tRSMco: Extracting video information
[debug] Default format spec: bestvideo+bestaudio/best
[download] Downloading video 2 of 2
[youtube] Lm-_ZUiEQDk: Downloading webpage
[youtube] Lm-_ZUiEQDk: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] Lm-_ZUiEQDk: Extracting video information
[debug] Default format spec: bestvideo+bestaudio/best
[download] Finished downloading playlist: Uploads from Jeffabel and Friends Extras

This video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tZPI1mmVPCk) is missing from the output.

[dstftw]

The rationale behind delegation to playlist extractor is clearly explained in the comment above the code mentioned: user rendition has a limitation of 100 pages with 30 videos per page (35 pages at the moment of writing the code), at the same time playlist has no such limitation and provides unlimited 100 videos per page rendition (see https://www.youtube.com/user/drighk/videos). “Fixing” it by removing the delegation will make it impossible to download whole channels with >3k videos.

[yuri-sevatz]

Someone recently managed to reproduce this on Reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/9qrlbp/i_wrote_a_pythonselenium_based_crawler_to_really/?st=jnmcv30j&sh=66312301

They were trying to download this user:

https://www.youtube.com/user/LanaDelRey/

Pasting my analysis here:

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Just trying some things to see what’s up here:

youtube-dl -s -v https://www.youtube.com/user/LanaDelRey/videos

This yields:

...
[youtube:user] LanaDelRey: Downloading channel page
[youtube:playlist] UUqk3CdGN_j8IR9z4uBbVPSg: Downloading webpage
...

Which means youtube-dl converted that user to this playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=UUqk3CdGN_j8IR9z4uBbVPSg

Which uses the exact same ID as the channel in all of yotube’s links (except a different prefix)

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqk3CdGN_j8IR9z4uBbVPSg

The channel’s id is this:

UCqk3CdGN_j8IR9z4uBbVPSg

Which gets converted with this code:

    if channel_playlist_id and channel_playlist_id.startswith('UC'):
        playlist_id = 'UU' + channel_playlist_id[2:]
        return self.url_result(compat_urlparse.urljoin(url, '/playlist?list=%s' % playlist_id), 'YoutubePlaylist')

From this line in YoutubeChannelIE: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py#L2485

YoutubeChannelIE is inherited by YoutubeUserIE, (probably because there is so much in common between the two). I would gather that their assumption – that this URL is the most ideal place to find all the channel’s videos – is probably an incorrect assumption in youtube-dl.

Imo this looks like a fairly drastic bug, but it shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

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Edit: Ironically even Youtube’s “Play All” button on the user’s “Uploads” page jumps to a playlist with only 22 videos too, despite there being more than 60 uploads in that playlist. This might be somewhat exasperated by a bug on Youtube’s server:

https://www.youtube.com/user/LanaDelRey/videos