youtube-dl: Unable to download Youtube stories anymore

I’m reporting a broken site support issue
I’ve verified that I’m running youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
I’ve checked that all provided URLs are alive and playable in a browser
I’ve checked that all URLs and arguments with special characters are properly quoted or escaped
I’ve searched the bug tracker for similar bug reports including closed ones
I’ve read the bugs section in FAQ

Verbose log

~$ youtube-dl -v https://youtube.com/shorts/9Vsdft81Q6w?feature=share                                       [debug] System config: []                             [debug] User config: []
[debug] Custom config: []                             [debug] Command-line args: ['-v', 'https://youtube.com/shorts/9Vsdft81Q6w?feature=share']                   [debug] Encodings: locale UTF-8, fs utf-8, out utf-8, pref UTF-8
[debug] youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
[debug] Python version 3.10.2 (CPython) - Linux-4.4.177-22825772-aarch64-with-libc
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg 5.0, ffprobe 5.0
[debug] Proxy map: {}
[youtube:tab] shorts: Downloading webpage
ERROR: Unable to recognize tab page; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 815, in wrapper
    return func(self, *args, **kwargs)                  File "/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py", line 836, in __extract_info
    ie_result = ie.extract(url)
  File "/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py", line 534, in extract
    ie_result = self._real_extract(url)
  File "/data/data/com.termux/files/usr/lib/python3.10/site-packages/youtube_dl/extractor/youtube.py", line 2862, in _real_extract
    raise ExtractorError('Unable to recognize tab page')
youtube_dl.utils.ExtractorError: Unable to recognize tab page; please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; see  https://yt-dl.org/update  on how to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

Description

This issue has persisted for about 6 months around. I wasn’t able to fix it. So my turnaround was to use third-party websites where I could do download the story videos. Normal videos just work as expected.

I tried both manually and scripting to do the same and both failed.

my ffmpeg is 5.0

I don’t have any more clues

About this issue

Original URL
State: closed
Created 2 years ago
Comments: 20 (12 by maintainers)

Most upvoted comments

And also, YouTube withdrew the Stories feature in June.

dirkf on Aug 16, 2023

(you’re back 👋)

YouTube stories are not the same as shorts. Stories have the same URL as normal videos, but expire after a week or so, and normally opens only in the app. We can fore it to open in browser (and make it work in ytdl) by adding a params=8AEB query to the URL.

@4cq2: I would not recommend using this. I noticed that YT-DLP is using it, but it has the side effect of breaking viewCount. so that value will no longer be in the output.

Nope

❯ yt-dlp test:youtube -O id,view_count=
id = "BaW_jenozKc"
view_count = 55266

pukkandan on Apr 18, 2023

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/pull/30577#issuecomment-1184701287

pukkandan on Oct 29, 2022

YouTube stories are not the same as shorts. Stories have the same URL as normal videos, but expire after a week or so, and normally opens only in the app. We can fore it to open in browser (and make it work in ytdl) by adding a params=8AEB query to the URL.

But the URL given by OP is a short and not a story. So I assume that is what they meant to ask about

pukkandan on Jul 12, 2022