Invalid URL, the URL must for a "YouTube channel"

[OmgImAlexis]

I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong but I can't seem to get this to accept any channel urls.

Selecting "add a youtube channel" and then using https://www.youtube.com/billwurtz as the url which works only it converts it to https://www.youtube.com/c/billwurtz which results in the source not working.

In the logs I see this over and over.

2021-09-25 17:51:46,798 [tubesync/ERROR] ERROR: [youtube:tab] billwurtz: Unable to download webpage: HTTP Error 404: Not Found (caused by <HTTPError 404: 'Not Found'>); please report this issue on https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp . Make sure you are using the latest version; see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp on how to update. Be sure to call yt-dlp with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

[meeb]

That's a vanity user URL which is still a bit twitchy to detect automatically. That channel is actually https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCq6aw03lNILzV96UvEAASfQ not /billwurtz so edit the channel to use a key of "UCq6aw03lNILzV96UvEAASfQ" for now.

[meeb]

Oh and you can find the channel ID yourself with ./manage.py youtube-dl-info https://www.youtube.com/user/billwurtz, at the end of the metadata it may be one of several fields, this case it was uploader_url.

[OmgImAlexis]

I personally grabbed it from the channel's meta tag via js in chrome but that's good to know. There's a meta tag called channelId.

[codyjanak]

I'm running into this same issue, but this fix doesn't work. TubeSync adds the channel name as https://www.youtube.com/c/UCUNoEsSfUcyNlaJbieYkMvg but that doesn't work because the correct URL is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUNoEsSfUcyNlaJbieYkMvg

The user channel is https://www.youtube.com/user/jonbois if that helps

[psyciknz]

And I would have similar with theslowmoguys. Uses the url: https://www.youtube.com/user/theslowmoguys Doesn't respond on https://www.youtube.com/c/theslowmoguys as it's on https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUK0HBIBWgM2c4vsPhkYY4w

Fastest solution would be allow the user to edit the URL it wants to use for download.

[meeb]

Arbitrary URLs caused issues in some cases as you could add something weird that still returned media (like the YouTube popular pages) and infinitely download content or you can add a channel very slightly incorrectly and then TubeSync will get 5 videos and then never download new content off the incorrect URL. These reasons and others are why there's a reasonably strict parser for the URLs and the guide to add channels or playlists.

I'm looking to add a "detect channel" feature to the guide which should be able to handle user aliased channels properly.