Using aria2c with ytdl-sub

[qwerty12]

Not a full config to share - I'm just using the built-in presets by way of examples\tv_show_config.yaml. Just had to set ffmpeg_path and ffprobe_path on top (Windows). Oh, I disabled .info.json generation with info_json_name: '' - I'm using Jellyfin to watch the downloads, so I don't really have a use for those. I wanted to use aria2c for my YT downloads, so after reading the yt-dlp argument-parsing code, here's something to put into a preset:

    ytdl_options:
      external_downloader:
        default: "aria2c"
      compat_options:
        - 'no-external-downloader-progress'
      external_downloader_args:
        aria2c:
          - '--show-console-readout=false'
          # - '--console-log-level=error'
          # - '--enable-color=false'
          # - '--quiet=true'

aria2c[.exe] will need to be in your $PATH.

no-external-downloader-progress is present to work around a possible bug but I'm not sure if it's even needed - after about 500 or so downloads with aria2c, I didn't hit yt-dlp issue #5931 once. Still, aside from possibly clogging up the YAML file, it won't do any harm.

show-console-readout=false is passed to aria2c to match ytdl-sub's default of not showing download progress. aria2c will still print error messages, however. If you desire all aria2c output to be silenced, just uncomment the quiet line.

(As an aside, the equivalent of --force-ipv4 is source_address: '0.0.0.0')

Many thanks for this program, jmbannon, as I took a look at the alternatives and they simply weren't suitable for my needs for various reasons. ytdl-sub does exactly what I need without any bloat.

[jmbannon]

This is good stuff @qwerty12 , might be worth creating a dedicated plugin for this!

I've always seen this in yt-dlp but never looked too deep at it. What is the benefit of using aria2c over ffmpeg?

[qwerty12]

Oh, sorry, I can't write

aria2c doesn't replace ffmpeg, but yt-dlp can outsource the downloading part to aria2c, which can open multiple connections to a site and download more than one "chunk" at the same time. Anecdotally speaking (I didn't do any proper testing at all so this could be a placebo - especially with YouTube's throttling), downloading a single video from YouTube with ytdl-sub using aria2c was quicker than with yt-dlp's internal downloader. (While I prefer aria2c, I think yt-dlp has the concurrent-fragments option that does something similar without depending on anything externally)

[jmbannon]

Right, yeah I think ffmpeg is the default downloader, and aria2c only replaces that bit.

The more I read about aria2c, the more I'm considering making it the default. I'm definitely going to make a downloader plugin and tinker with this over the next week or two, could be a game changer