fix(yt-dlp): upgrade a stale copy before import, stop misrouting 403s to streamlink - #4
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AdinathChaudhari wants to merge 1 commit into
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… to streamlink A yt-dlp more than a couple of weeks old still lists formats correctly and then dies partway through the transfer with a bare HTTP 403 — the site rotated its player and the signatures the old copy computes no longer validate. ensure_yt_dlp() only ever installed a *missing* copy, so a working install silently rotted. - Read the installed version with importlib.metadata (no package import) and pip install --upgrade when it is older than YT_DLP_MAX_AGE_DAYS (14). This has to run before the first `import yt_dlp`: a package replaced underneath a live process is not picked up by a re-import, so a mid-run upgrade cannot help. - A failed pip no longer raises; the run continues on whatever is installed, and a genuinely missing yt-dlp now exits with an install hint instead of a traceback. - On a download failure, _looks_stale() recognises the CDN-rejection signatures. When one hits a URL a specific (non-generic) extractor claimed, the media was found and the transfer was refused, so streamlink cannot help — it installs 8 MB of dependencies and ends in "No plugin can handle URL". Print the upgrade command instead. Every other download error still falls through to streamlink. Verified against a real URL that reproduced the 403: fails on 2026.07.04, downloads complete on 2026.08.19. Both new branches exercised — a stale version triggers the upgrade and a current one does not; a 403 on a known extractor skips streamlink while an unrelated error still reaches it. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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The failure
A download would list every quality correctly, start, and then stop partway with a bare
HTTP Error 403: Forbidden. anydl then announced "yt-dlp can't grab this directly", installed~8 MB of streamlink dependencies, and finished with
No plugin can handle URL.Both halves of that were wrong. The 403 was a stale yt-dlp — the site had rotated its player
and the signatures the old copy computes no longer validate. And streamlink was never going to
help: the media was found, the CDN just refused the transfer.
Root cause
ensure_yt_dlp()only installed yt-dlp when it was missing. A working install was nevertouched again, so it quietly rotted — and these breakages land every few weeks.
Changes
1. Upgrade a stale yt-dlp before the import.
Read the installed version with
importlib.metadata(which doesn't import the package), andpip install --upgradewhen it's older thanYT_DLP_MAX_AGE_DAYS(14). This has to happenbefore the first
import yt_dlp— a package swapped out underneath a running process isn'tpicked up by a re-import, so there's no mid-run rescue. A failed
pipprints and continues onwhatever is installed rather than aborting; a genuinely missing yt-dlp now exits with an install
hint instead of a traceback.
2. Don't route a CDN rejection to streamlink.
_looks_stale()matches the 403 / "unable to download video data" / "requested format is notavailable" signatures. When one of those hits a URL that a specific (non-generic) extractor
claimed, print the upgrade command instead of the streamlink detour. Every other download
error still falls through to streamlink — the never-a-dead-end path is intact.
Verification
Reproduced against a real URL that was failing:
Both new branches exercised directly, with the streamlink call stubbed to see which path is taken:
pip install --upgrade yt-dlpcalled; current version → no pip callknown_extractor()re-checked on real URLs (it correctly rejects malformed IDs, which is whatmakes the guard safe to gate on).