Skip to content

SponsorBlock API timeout marks a downloaded video as failed and re-downloads it #965

Closed

Description

@dialmaster

A user reported this one. When the SponsorBlock lookup times out, yt-dlp still downloads the video (we pass --ignore-errors); it just skips removing or marking the segments. But yt-dlp still prints an ERROR: line, and YtdlpErrorTracker treats any ERROR: line it doesn't recognize as a failure of the current video. So Youtarr:

  • marks the video as failed in Download History and the notification, even though the file is there and the Videos row was already saved
  • ends the job as Error (or Complete with Warnings if other videos downloaded)
  • removes the video from complete.list, so the next channel run downloads the whole thing again

From the user's logs:

ERROR: Unable to communicate with SponsorBlock API: HTTPSConnectionPool(host='sponsor.ajay.app', port=443): Read timed out. (read timeout=30.0)
Removed failed video from archive for retry on next run {"youtubeId":"qP2ouDp3HMY"}

I think this should be handled the same way as subtitle download failures:

  • Match Unable to communicate with SponsorBlock API at the start of the message. The Preprocessing: form, where the video really is abandoned, should still count as a failure.
  • Don't count it as a video failure.
  • End the job as Complete with Warnings, with a note that SponsorBlock couldn't be reached for N videos.

Activity

  1. dialmaster commented on Oct 26, 2026

    @dialmaster
    CollaboratorAuthor

    The fix for this in #966 has been approved and merged to dev. It will go out with the next release.

  2. dialmaster commented on Oct 27, 2026

    @dialmaster
    CollaboratorAuthor
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions