youtube-dl dead on arrival when installed from the apt repositories

Bug #1845694 reported by P. Reed
This bug report is a duplicate of:  Bug #1529647: [SRU] Update to 2021.04.07 or higher. Edit Remove
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
youtube-dl (Ubuntu)
Confirmed
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

$ lsb_release -rd
Description: Ubuntu 18.04.3 LTS
Release: 18.04

$ apt-cache policy youtube-dl
youtube-dl:
  Installed: 2018.03.14-1ubuntu18.04.1
  Candidate: 2018.03.14-1ubuntu18.04.1
  Version table:
 *** 2018.03.14-1ubuntu18.04.1 500
        500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic-updates/universe i386 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     2018.03.14-1 500
        500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu bionic/universe i386 Packages

$ youtube-dl 'cbP2N1BQdYc'

[youtube] cbP2N1BQdYc: Downloading webpage
[youtube] cbP2N1BQdYc: Downloading video info webpage
WARNING: Unable to extract video title
[youtube] cbP2N1BQdYc: Extracting video information
ERROR: Unable to extract uploader name; 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.

Apparently because YouTube has changed since then and the old code no longer works with it. The version of youtube-dl packaged in pypi (for installation via pip; 'youtube-dl --version' from within a venv shows 2018.03.14) seems to be outdated too and produces a similar error. The solution was to install the latest version from the projects github page: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#installation

However, adding the newest version of the package to the repositories would not be a permanent solution. YouTube can change anytime and thus the youtube-dl in the repositories would have to be updated too correspondingly, is it "acceptable" to have such a fast updating package in an LTS version?

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

Changed in youtube-dl (Ubuntu):
status: New → Confirmed
Revision history for this message
Prabhat Soni (ubuntudev2018) wrote :

youtube-dl is not the latest version on apt repository (like 2 years old)
You can download youtube-dl from: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

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