"--less-verbose" option

[TupaNegreiros]

• [x] I'm reporting a feature request
• [x] I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2021.12.17
• [x] I've searched the bugtracker for similar feature requests including closed ones

I use youtube-dl to download channels and playlists, and everyday I download new videos of those channels/playlists.

So if I run: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/channel/somechannel --no-warnings --download-archive downloaded.txt

Then run a second time: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/channel/somechannel --no-warnings --download-archive downloaded.txt

A lot of the output are lines like: [youtube:tab] Downloading page X [download] Downloading video 1 of 595 [download] X1234 has already been recorded in archive

It could be great to have a option "--less-verbose" to output only lines like errors and downloaded videos. "--quiet" shows no output at all. My log are huge, almost impossible to find anything on it.

[dirkf]

Redirect the standard output to the bit-bucket:

• POSIX: ... >/dev/null
• Windows cmd: ... >NUL

Output like

WARNING: Falling back on generic information extractor.
ERROR: Unsupported URL: http://survey-smiles.com/

sent to standard error will still appear.

[TupaNegreiros]

>/dev/null seems to have the same effect as "-q" I get errors like: ERROR: The playlist does not exist. but not the previous line showing which video/playlist.

Also, getting log of downloaded videos is useful. Getting log of skipped downloads are irrelevant.

[dirkf]

Otherwise, pipe the output through grep or awk (POSIX) or findstr (Windows cmd) to strip out the output lines you don't want.

Or fork the code and filter messages in Python: see #31466.

[dirkf]

I'll mark this off now. Nonetheless, a well-justified PR might be considered.