Talk:Community Wishlist/W447

Update from WMF

@Prototyperspective

Thank you for your wish!

Though this feature is not supported by WMF, we will keep this in mind as we are currently working on prioritizing some video2commons issues as mentioned in another wish discussion. I'll provide an update as soon as possible. MikeZ-WMF (talk) 14:58, 27 November 2025 (UTC)

This is in progress, but the last part is still open - fixing videos imported with low quality. Feedback from Amdrel:

It's possible that sometimes the highest quality formats are only available in the new SABR formats, at least temporarily until YT transcodes them for clients that don't support it. yt-dlp doesn't support SABR downloads at the moment.

I couldn't reproduce quality issues with any of the affected videos in Commons. My guess is that yt-dlp is unable to download the best quality videos if the upload is too recent and so it falls back to lower quality versions.

MikeZ-WMF (talk) 10:36, 29 January 2026 (UTC)

This problem started to exist long ago so I wonder how it could have to do with new formats. I wonder why Amdrel could not reproduce the problem, maybe the example linked in the wish wasn't a good example – here are 50 files of which the majority should be imported below source resolution (it's easy to check: just compare the quality to the YT video). A more recent example is here and a category tracking confirmed below-source files is here.

Please let me know if I should comment this on some pull-request or issue. I've never seen SABR files in my tests (such as separately downloading with yt-dlp and maybe also the --lists-formats command parameter). When I uploaded the videos that were uploaded below source quality that was long after it got uploaded to YT so the upload being too recent is quite implausible.

I thought the difficulty there would rather be how to mass-update the below-source videos – there would need to be some batch upload of the higher-quality video as new revision for each of the files and I don't know whether such has been done before. Prototyperspective (talk) 00:07, 30 January 2026 (UTC)

I just spoke with Amdrel about this - we assume that since YouTube has many variables due to various formats and platforms, it may result in some discrepancies in reproducibility. So this is becoming a bit of a game of whack-a-mole. What we can do is ensure we keep yt-dlp up to date, particularly when there is a new release to solve these types of issues.

Or I wonder if there is a way to quantify bigger slices that need to be fixed? MikeZ-WMF (talk) 17:02, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Yes, often problems with YouTube are fixed in updated versions of yt-dlp. The 51 examples above are not meant to be exhaustive. I think these should be fixed but ideally all videos that were imported with quality below source. Here is a revised version of the link included in the wish (which had 8668 files) now containing just 2051 files all just from youtube. I think maybe half of those have better quality at source so around 1000 files. However, not all videos imported below source have a resolution of 640width and I don't know how to identify the other ones but one could consider making a separate wish/issue about these and/or first investigate how many files with other resolutions (like the example above) are also affected (and maybe Commons users at VillagePump/Technical will identify a way to identify these). Prototyperspective (talk) 18:05, 10 February 2026 (UTC)

Thank you! I summarized your suggested next steps in the Phabricator ticket for Amdrel: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T416016#11614495 MikeZ-WMF (talk) 11:18, 13 February 2026 (UTC)

For folks following, we are closing this but filing a spinoff wish to investigate and fix remaining slices of old videos that are alluding us:

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist/W512

Thank you @Prototyperspective for all the suport! MikeZ-WMF (talk) 11:09, 27 February 2026 (UTC)