interesting 👍

Commit 386afb1 is not correct. I'm not sure what you are trying to do with it but both regex are identical, the first is checked against episode.url and second against episode.link. Compiling the regex is good idea though.

I must have been asleep when I made the previous push, it should work now.

But, is checking episode.link really necessary? PodcastEpisode.from_podcastparser_entry() in model.py does not create an episode object without a verified episode.url. Testing the 'link' property when creating the downloader would be then useless, unless episodes are created some other way.

I don't know why the episode.link check happens but your cache patch appears to return episode.url for the episode.link branch.

As for the force default download, does that mean youtube-dl won't be used to download a DRM video that uses a known mime type?

@tpikonen What's the point of 0406835?

@elelay youtube-dl supports URLs to downloadable files, so it will be always used as a downloader unless some kind of filtering is used. The commit was a quick fix to use the default downloader for the usual media file mime types.

On second thought it's better to make this filtering in the extension itself. Suggestions on what mime types, extensions etc. should and should not be downloaded by youtube-dl would be welcome.

The extension now rejects downloads which would use the Generic youtube-dl extractor. This is a bit slow way to check for suitable URLs (0.3 s on my i5 laptop), but works as intended, so that normal media files are downloaded with the default downloader. Prefiltering by mime type or file extension from URL could be still implemented on top of this.

I tried to look if there are places in gpodder code where episodes without a valid 'url' attribute are be created, but could not find any, so I removed support for URLs in episode.link. If code creating episodes without an 'url' is there, I think it's better to treat it as buggy.

Also rebased to current master.

This PR currently contains basically two changes:

1. Make the youtube-dl extension support all the URLs supported by youtube-dl and accept episodes from feeds where the episode.link element is supported by youtube-dl or other downloader.
2. Stream episode.url links directly with the video player if a custom downloader exists and a config var is set.

The second change is arguably a bit hacky, but would the first change be acceptable? I can split these two into separate PRs if so.

What feeds does this PR fix?

I'm using this to follow radio and tv shows from the Finnish broadcaster Yle. The feeds are at https://feeds.yle.fi/ (example: https://feeds.yle.fi/areena/v1/series/1-50697851.rss). There are some feeds there with normal media enclosures, but most are only accessible from the streaming service at areena.yle.fi via the episode link.

Rebased to master. @elelay are there further issues with the code?

LGTM, but I can't test the improvement it brings

I agree, the code looks good but https://feeds.yle.fi/areena/v1/series/1-50697851.rss still doesn't contain any episodes.

The YLE feeds are a bad example, since they need a patched youtube-dl, but that's what I use this PR for.

There are 3rd party feeds for the BBC iPlayer which work, modulo geoblocking (and the server is really slow).

Then there is RSS-bridge which has feeds for lots of things, like Bandcamp (example).

These feeds have images in enclosures, so I changed the feed parsing to reject them in favor of episode.link, when there is something to download there.

Also, the youtube-dl extension needs improving in format handling, but here's quick hack if anyone wants to test the feeds above:

diff --git a/share/gpodder/extensions/youtube-dl.py b/share/gpodder/extensions/youtube-dl.py
index 2704ca8a..3368f7b2 100644
--- a/share/gpodder/extensions/youtube-dl.py
+++ b/share/gpodder/extensions/youtube-dl.py
@@ -311,6 +311,7 @@ class gPodderYoutubeDL(download.CustomDownloader):
         opts['format'] = '/'.join(str(fmt) for fmt in fmt_ids)
         if fallback:
             opts['format'] += '/' + fallback
+        opts['format'] += '/bestvideo+bestaudio[abr<=256]/bestaudio[abr<=256]/best'
         logger.debug('format=%s', opts['format'])
 
     def fetch_video(self, url, tempname, reporthook):

Merged, thanks

Thanks for merging. I have some ideas to improve #963 so that streaming can be made to work for ytdl-links as well.

Thanks, I've seen your comment above about improving format handling in the youtube-dl extension.
Looking forward to it 👍