Only fetch videos with CC

[KevinColemanInc]

I think yt-dlp fetches all the videos in a channel, then fetches the stats of each video (checking to see if there are captions).

Large channels with single-digit number number of videos with captions are slow to download (and hit api limits).

The (paid and official) YouTube API allows you to retrieve the video IDs with captions in a specific channel.

curl

curl \
  'https://youtube.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/search?channelId=[ChannelID]&part=id&type=video&videoCaption=closedCaption&key=[KEY]' \
  --header 'Accept: application/json' \
  --compressed

response

{
  "kind": "youtube#searchListResponse",
  "etag": "995jyKTI3Q_SpXkNvcBCDR77qP0",
  "nextPageToken": "CAUQAA",
  "regionCode": "",
  "pageInfo": {
    "totalResults": 141,
    "resultsPerPage": 5
  },
  "items": [
    {
      "kind": "youtube#searchResult",
      "etag": "",
      "id": {
        "kind": "youtube#video",
        "videoId": ""
      }
    },
    {
      "kind": "youtube#searchResult",
      "etag": "",
      "id": {
        "kind": "youtube#video",
        "videoId": ""
      }
    },
    {
      "kind": "youtube#searchResult",
      "etag": "",
      "id": {
        "kind": "youtube#video",
        "videoId": ""
      }
    },
    {
      "kind": "youtube#searchResult",
      "etag": "",
      "id": {
        "kind": "youtube#video",
        "videoId": ""
      }
    },
    {
      "kind": "youtube#searchResult",
      "etag": "",
      "id": {
        "kind": "youtube#video",
        "videoId": ""
      }
    }
  ]
}

[NotJoeMartinez]

Have you tried multi threaded downloading? It substantially decreases the time it takes to download a channel

yt-fts download --number-of-jobs 5 "https://www.youtube.com/@3blue1brown"

[KevinColemanInc]

@NotJoeMartinez I have not tried it, but I worry about hitting rate limits. I only tested a few channels, but I found at least one channel with over 1,000 videos with none of them having captions. Even with 5 jobs, that is still a lot of requests to waste time on.

[theAkito]

I just hit hard rate limits without increasing number of jobs. The channel isn't that big or relevant.