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Frequently Asked Questions

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benoit74 edited this page Oct 21, 2024 · 5 revisions

(Frequently Asked Question / Frequently Encountered Errors)

What is the difference between a channel / user / handle

This is a obscure legacy from Youtube (or at least we did not found proper documentation yet). When the URL you use in your browser is https://www.youtube.com/Madrasa, then the "channel / user / handle" is Madrasa. It is unclear why Youtube makes a distinction between these three terms at the API level and in some other places. Since Sept-Oct 2024 (3.2.0), the scraper hides this complexity and you only pass the --channel xxxx setting, and the scraper automatically look for xxxx as handle, if it fails as channel, and if it fails as a user.

ERROR:Impossible to find xxx, check for typos

  • Are you sure the ID you provided has no typo?
  • If you use the nice looking channel / user / handle from the URL, try to find the technical ID in the HTML page and use this value instead (see below)

Why does the scraper fails to find my channel / user / handle ?

This is obscure. On some rare occasion, Youtube API refuses the nice-looking channel / user / handle from the URL. Since the introduction of handle in Sept-Oct 2024 (3.2.0) in the scraper, this should become very rare. In these rare situations, a potential solution is to use the technical ID which is hidden behind the nice-looking thing. See below.

How do I find a channel / user / handle technical ID

Open the channel on your browser (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/Madrasa), open the page source code and search for the ID in something like <meta itemprop="identifier" content="UCq0wtwcAmYtS3VUCgh1BWAg">. Content value (UCq0wtwcAmYtS3VUCgh1BWAg here) is our technical ID, to be used as Youtube ID in the scraper/recipe configuration.

How do I find a playlist ID?

The playlist ID is the list parameter in Youtube URL, when you're playing a playlist (or more exactly, a video from a playlist). E.g. when your URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AxptnwZ1V4&list=PLsRNoUx8w3rNyeKk_xNnclpAqrWQztioB&index=1&pp=iAQB, the playlist ID is PLsRNoUx8w3rNyeKk_xNnclpAqrWQztioB.

What is the profile and banner images and where do they come from?

Profile and banner images are used as page headers when viewing list of videos.

image

When they are not provided in scraper configuration, the profile is automatically fetched from Youtube.

The banner is not automatically fetched anymore for now, see https://github.com/openzim/youtube/issues/342

When the ID is a channel or user, the profile image is fetched from this channel/user.

When the ID is a playlist or list of playlist, the profile image is fetched from the channel/user of the first playlist.

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