Is there a way to download video while keeping their chapters metadata?

Question

I've used many video downloaders before: atube catcher, 4k downloader, jDownloader, and currently using youtube-dl. I can't download videos, this for example, while still keeping their online chapters intact, like part1 is "intro" lasting from 00:00 to 00:45 and so on. So far I tried these parameters with youtube-dl

Filesystem

--write-annotations --write-description --write-info-json

Thumbnail images

--write-all-thumbnails

Video format

-f 'bestvideo[height<=720]+bestaudio/best[height<=720]/worst' --merge-output-format mp4

Post-processing

--add-metadata --embed-subs --embed-thumbnail

Also tried requesting the mkv video format (thought maybe it was built into it) didn't help tho.
I know these options don't really say anything about sections but I'm trying to get as much metadata as I can

Welcome to SO and please read [How do I ask a good question?](https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask) — Ahmet, Aug 15 '20 at 04:51
@Ahmet Can you please be more specific? I did read it and to my knowledge I made sure to follow them. — Mohammad AbouElSherbini, Aug 15 '20 at 05:45
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp supports `--split-chapters`, works quite nicely, also with audio — Zarathustra, May 21 '21 at 19:12
I vote for this to be on topic, and down vote on stackoverflow's policy. — Vincent Alex, Nov 30 '21 at 16:16

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 15 '20 at 05:10

The information you want is called chapters in the youtube-dl info JSON.

There is a recent open pull request for youtube-dl that fixes a problem with this information. In the current release of youtube-dl, if you use the ---write-info-json or --dump-json you will see that the chapters information is null ("chapters": null). You can use the code in the fork repository to be able to obtain the information you want.

Follow these steps:

Clone this repository:

git clone https://github.com/gschizas/youtube-dl.git

Change to the repository directory:
```
cd youtube-dl/
```

Checkout the pull request branch:

git checkout bugfix/youtube/chapters-fix-extractor

Run youtube-dl from the current location:

python -m youtube_dl --write-info-json https://youtu.be/LnO42jxJaC4

You will see information like this in the info JSON:

"chapters": [
    {
        "start_time": 0.0,
        "end_time": 46.0,
        "title": "Intro"
    },
    {
        "start_time": 46.0,
        "end_time": 72.0,
        "title": "QOTD"
    },
    ...
]

Hopefully the fix will be accepted into the youtube-dl repository and included in future releases, so there will be no need to clone any repository.

thanks a lot. 1 thing to add is: I used this "python path/to/youtube_dl/__main__.py --arguments" instead so I can use it from anywhere in my .bat scripts — Mohammad AbouElSherbini, Aug 15 '20 at 08:47

Is there a way to download video while keeping their chapters metadata?

Filesystem

Thumbnail images

Video format

Post-processing

1 Answers1