Commons talk:Video2commons

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Failed to upload videos from bilibili

Reproduction: Upload this link, select keep video and keep audio, then got An exception occurred: DownloadError: b'ERROR: Postprocessing: file:/srv/v2c/output/3d9c276d627ff19f/dl.danmaku.xml: Invalid data found when processing input'

I found this issue in Github that seems related to subtitles, but I'm sure I have unselected "Import subtitles". Steven Sun (talk) 00:38, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

I tried running yt-dlp command yt-dlp https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1hw411i7Ba/ in my local that works fine, so I think it is not a yt-dlp issue. Steven Sun (talk) 00:59, 8 December 2025 (UTC)

Age-restricted videos

Prior discussion: Commons talk:Video2commons/Archive/2024#Cannot upload age-restricted videos

@Don-vip: is there an update on this?

I'm trying to upload a free-licensed documentary that includes graphic content of industrial livestock farming and for that reason is 18+ and requiring a login. I'm able to download it locally with yt-dlp just fine without any extra options or plugins but converting the mp4 to webm with the --recode-video webm option will take a long time on my computer. Prototyperspective (talk) 11:25, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

@Prototyperspective I upload mp4 videos directly to video2commons and the server handles the conversion to webm. Would this be a solution for you too? Raymond (talk) 12:01, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

@Amdrel I think I forgot to mention this point in the video2commons TODO-list. vip (talk) 14:31, 12 December 2025 (UTC)

The only way to circumvent this error is to keep an authenticated YouTube session on the encoding servers of an age verified account, which V2C does support. However, this has become a maintenance burden as the sessions have a very short lifetime now and eventually require someone to manually refresh them. There is currently no mechanism supported by Google to authenticate V2C users with YouTube to perform the download using their own account (e.g. with OAuth). In my personal opinion I don't think this is feasible to support with the current restrictions YouTube imposes on us.

@Prototyperspective you did mention that you were able to download the videos with yt-dlp just fine. Was your yt-dlp authenticated with a session or was it done anonymously? If it was downloaded anonymously it may be possible that YouTube is enforcing age restriction rules differently depending on where a request is coming from geographically. Amdrel (talk) 18:25, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

In regards to authentication I only used --cookies-from-browser firefox while logged into YouTube in Firefox but I don't know if this currently still works... Prototyperspective (talk) 18:44, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

YouTube changed license to CC BY 4.0

YouTube changed the standard license to CC BY 4.0, but V2C adds the license template for CC BY 3.0 (see here: Commons:Village_pump#YouTube_moved_to_CC_BY_version_number_4.0) --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 15:33, 22 December 2025 (UTC)

Is this solved? Prototyperspective (talk) 17:46, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

https://github.com/toolforge/video2commons/pull/278 .--RoyZuo (talk) 18:20, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

This section is resolved and can be archived. If you disagree, replace this template with your comment. RoyZuo (talk) 18:20, 20 February 2026 (UTC)

Document examples of ffmpeg arguments to use at own hardware

I tried to upload a video in Apple QuickTime format (from Olympus E-M10 Mark II camera) to the Commons and I was send to https://video2commons.toolforge.org. I'm using the tool for the first time. I see a task (without audio and subtitles):

Running cmd: /mnt/nfs/labstore-secondary-project/gentoo-prefix/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i /srv/v2c/output/d8419babdc8fb744/dl.unknown_video -max_muxing_queue_size 4096 -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -threads 8 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -vcodec libsvtav1 -svtav1-params lp=8 -preset 6 -f webm -ss 0 -an /srv/v2c/output/d8419babdc8fb744/dl.unknown_video.an.av1.webm

Maybe we can document such commands with recommended parameters, so experienced users can use them locally and not spend servers time? Alexey Vazhnov (talk) 19:27, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

@Alexey Vazhnov: Please see en:ffmpeg and ffmpeg.org for starters, and then Adjust VP9 quality to lower output size #253.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 20:12, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

@Alexey Vazhnov, I suggest the opposite: leave it to v2c.

the servers are actually most of the time not that busy. RoyZuo (talk) 20:54, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Couldn't find any example for av1 from your links (so I had to search further, I know).

Let me keep here the second command, which converts both video (into amazing AV1) + audio (into Opus):

Running cmd: /mnt/nfs/labstore-secondary-project/gentoo-prefix/usr/bin/ffmpeg -y -i /srv/v2c/output/7c0ebb1e8301c920/dl.unknown_video -max_muxing_queue_size 4096 -movflags use_metadata_tags -map_metadata 0 -threads 8 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -vcodec libsvtav1 -svtav1-params lp=8 -preset 6 -f webm -ss 0 -b:a 128000 -ar 48000 -acodec libopus /srv/v2c/output/7c0ebb1e8301c920/dl.unknown_video.av1.webm

--Alexey Vazhnov (talk) 20:59, 24 December 2025 (UTC)

Maybe we can document such commands with recommended parameters, so experienced users can use them locally and not spend servers time? This is already  Done; see Help:Converting video and pages linked from there. If something is missing in these pages, I suggest to propose adding or asking on their talk pages or adding it directly. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:38, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

Awesome! Thank you! Alexey Vazhnov (talk) 00:43, 3 January 2026 (UTC)

V2C imports not at best resolution

Hi!

I have some cases where Video2Commons uploads YouTube videos in FHD, but not 4K. An example is here: File:ASMR in Czech - Whispers in my Native Language.webm. Can this be fixed? --PantheraLeo1359531 😺 (talk) 17:40, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

See also the prior threads here. Wish about this is W447: Fix video2commons so it imports videos at max resolution & fix videos imported with low quality which seems to be in progress. To fix the low-resolution uploads maybe a list of affected files and/or especially a ways to identify such as needed (the former more for validation that all affected files probably got fixed).

However, I'm highly skeptical of a video of a person whispering into a microphone has realistic educational use at any resolution (just more so if takes up so much storage space) per COM:SCOPE, not even sure the audio would be of much use but there it would be less objectionable than such a high-resolution video so I'd probably oppose rather useless unused files to get reuploaded in 3+GB-sized videos. Prototyperspective (talk) 13:18, 5 February 2026 (UTC)

Bug: only a short part of video is uploaded

File:How do astronomers use ultraviolet light to make discoveries-.webm is just 11 seconds but the original video is much longer.

Is this a bug in video2commons or in something else?

Maybe that bug is also what caused the 0 sec video uploads by User:OptimusPrimeBot such as this or this. (@Don-vip: ) Prototyperspective (talk) 23:41, 5 January 2026 (UTC)

Error

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: [youtube] U9NU-K9XKhQ: Requested format is not available. Use --list-formats for a list of available formats

TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 12:17, 15 January 2026 (UTC)

Got the same bug. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 07:44, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: [youtube] e7Kwoatsiuk: Requested format is not available. Use --list-formats for a list of available formats

TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 17:23, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

Got the same bug. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 07:44, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: [youtube] SOWBtuuCDig: Video unavailable. This content isn't available, try again later. Your account has been rate-limited by YouTube for up to an hour. It is recommended to use `-t sleep` to add a delay between video requests to avoid exceeding the rate limit. For more information, refer to https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#this-content-isnt-available-try-again-later

TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 18:11, 16 January 2026 (UTC)

Got the same bug. – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 07:43, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: The downloaded file is empty

TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 13:30, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: [youtube] ru0nbXs-Fxc: Requested format is not available. Use --list-formats for a list of available formats

--TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 19:52, 17 January 2026 (UTC)

Got the same bug! – Illegitimate Barrister (talk • contribs), 07:13, 18 January 2026 (UTC)

celery1@encoding03 Download failed. creating YoutubeDL instance without local cache

then

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: The downloaded file is empty

--TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 18:41, 23 January 2026 (UTC)

maybe @Amdrel may want to take a look into these bugs. RoyZuo (talk) 11:51, 24 January 2026 (UTC)

A few of these look like rate-limiting errors to me. We can't do much about those other than wait and try again later. However, those error messages could be made more clear to users to prevent confusion. As for the format error that one is probably something else. I can look into that. Amdrel (talk) 18:15, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

What are rate-limiting errors? I'm having those for more than two weeks now. TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 20:20, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

It's because video2commons is downloading too much content from YouTube in a short amount of time. If we make too many downloads then YouTube puts us in time out and downloads stop working for a while. This limitation applies to the video2commons service as a whole, so if YouTube temporarily disables downloads then it affects everyone using video2commons.

If waiting for a few hours or a day doesn't fix the problem then it's because video downloads from someone else using video2commons caused the same issue. YouTube has unfortunately been making it progressively more difficult to download content from their site over the years. Amdrel (talk) 21:18, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

What a shame, and thanks for the info. Now it's just wait, then. TaronjaSatsuma (talk) 21:40, 28 January 2026 (UTC)

No such file or directory: 'ffprobe'

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T417226

After uploading a file and entering wikitext, it refused to publish:
An exception occurred: FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] No such file or directory: 'ffprobe' - Alexis Jazz ^{ping plz} 19:47, 11 February 2026 (UTC)

I'm having the same issue. Hopefully it gets fixed because I have quite a few videos to upload. PublicDomainFan08 (talk) 20:59, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

"seems completely broken and not even accepting uploaded files"

See Special:Diff/1164024705.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 00:46, 12 February 2026 (UTC)

Tool dysfunctional: "Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot"

I can't upload anything because I get this error:

An exception occurred: DownloadError: ERROR: [youtube] dknh39cK_e0: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot. Use --cookies-from-browser or --cookies for the authentication. See https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/FAQ#how-do-i-pass-cookies-to-yt-dlp for how to manually pass cookies. Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Extractors#exporting-youtube-cookies for tips on effectively exporting YouTube cookies

Prototyperspective (talk) 14:55, 21 February 2026 (UTC)

Removing the need for manual human review for future uploads with v2c

There are currently well over 82,399 files needing license review in Category:License review needed.

So we're not keeping up with the backlogs and the backlog just for the past is huge.

This is a reason for why it would be wise to think about how we could reduce the backlog in effective ways. License review also takes up precious volunteer time.

So I recently had some idea when it comes to future uploads of videos using video2commons:

yt-dlp that video2commons uses can check the license of the video at least for YouTube. Video2Commons can also upload it if the license is not CCBY but one could use yt-dlp's check of the license to verify the license at source of the file.

If the license at source is detected to be CCBY, do not add {{LicenseReview}} to the file description and instead modify the submitted video description after the user has confirmed the description. So regardless what the user adds or removes in the input field for the video description (where there by default is the Information template, the license section, and the categories), always insert this content: {{LicenseReview|site={{From YouTube|[…]}}|user=auto|date=…}}.

If the user does not mess up the file description, there should be =={{int:license-header}}=={{YouTube CC-BY|video title}} in the file page and if that's there, just add this template directly beneath it (if not, probably at the bottom). Because uploads with video2commons have a tool tag, uploads that have this tag in the first diff and this template are verified as having the CCBY license at source. I don't know the details of how to use yt-dlp to get the license of the video but you can see that it's possible at Commons:YouTube files/Downloading#yt-dlp.

This may not be needed due to User:LicenseReviewerBot which seems to be intended to do automatic YouTube reviews. However, it apparently has to compare the video contents to verify and either isn't yet running or sth else is causing it to rarely ever confirm videos. It may be better to do the license verification within v2c so I'm leaving this here. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:19, 22 February 2026 (UTC)

Sound good for me. Raymond (talk) 08:55, 22 February 2026 (UTC)