youtube-dl: Problems with automatically setting the video's mtime to the server's modification time

+1 for --no-mtime to be the default, and --xattrs and, in fact, --add-metadata too.

These are flags that add information without breaking anything AFAIK, which is a good thing and definitely should be on by default.

--mtime by default is just plain confusing.

I’m not sure if you are counting votes or anything, but +1 for this. I’ve just out of habit tried ls -rtl to find the downloaded video from youtube and was bit confused it was nowhere to be find.

While --mtime could be possible handy, I think vast majority of people would expect --no-mtime to be the default, same way as other downloaders work.

But that’s just, like, my opinion ^_^

Yeah, it works.

It seems like it would be better if the default was --no-mtime, and that there was an --mtime option instead.

The current behaviour would make sense if the server time related to the original video’s creation date, but it’s not. I’m not even sure that it is reliably related to the upload date?

+1 million

I think having the default date modified be the upload date violates the principle of least astonishment, since most tools set it to the current time. People will assume it operates like most other tools, as I did, and it can cause real problems.

I went years without realizing what it was actually doing. I really like to have a record of when I first found and downloaded a video, and now there’s years of videos I’ve saved where I have no idea what period of my life they’re from. The worst part is, it effectively poisoned the date modifieds on all the videos downloaded before that as well. If I see a video with a date from before that period, I don’t know if it’s actually from then, or if it’s one downloaded with youtube-dl with a date that artificially put it back then.

It wasn’t until I was trawling through the list of options and saw --no-mtime that I realized what happened. At the very least, I’d recommend putting a note somewhere prominent about what the default date modified will be.

I think the strongest argument is that every other program (except wget) sets the mtime to the current time, and the ctime to the remote file’s time.

Knowing the order you downloaded files in a directory helps you process them more easily.

--no-mtime definitely should be default. I have almost deleted new videos with find /youtube -type f -mtime +7 -delete.

In keeping consistent with your remarks, I understand where you are coming from.

I’m indifferent, though setting these doesn’t operationally or visually interfere with anyone or anything (so we might as well).

Dustin

On Mon, Mar 6, 2017 at 12:53 PM, Yen Chi Hsuan notifications@github.com wrote:

+1 for making --no-mtime as the default. IMO youtube-dl is a video/audio downloader. All other actions besides downloading the contents of video/audio streams shouldn’t be there unless explicitly requested.

setting the xattrs

-1 on this. xattrs shouldn’t be added without --xattrs

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+1 on all (changing the default, setting the ctime to this value instead of the ctime, setting the xattrs).

What’s it going to take to move forward? This conversation has been stalled for a couple of years.

I think you can argue this either way, but it confused me at first having the download file’s date/time appear to be wrong, in most cases the date always seems to be about 23 hours ago for some reason - would be nice if the --no-mtime option was a little more prominent in the docs/online help.

Using the --no-mtime option disables this behaviour, does it work for you?