If this is the case, how does it come that I am able to download it with YouTube Playlist Downloader without any problems? Also, yt-dlp works like a charm, a program needed to access member only videos.
The problem with having the LINGQ server do all the YTDLP functions is that LingQs IP makes enormous amounts of requests to YouTube. YouTube is actively preventing this behaviour. They would need to develop a client side solution that works across multiple devices (good luck) to make distributed requests acting like a normal user would. Otherwise they will face the issue of constantly rotating IPs, setting up new servers etc. legal notices with no merit but scary letterhead etc.
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I think saying an app is “no longer supported” isn’t the same as saying it no longer exists. The import app may still exist, and may still work for certain things, some of the time, but it isn’t being supported because it’s too problematic. Does that make sense?
What I don’t understand is why we can’t simply upload an mp4 file with video and audio. Why do we need to upload our own audio file and then link it to a YouTube video? Is there a technical reason for that?
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I just did that actually. there was no point in paying for something that’ seems to be no longer offered.
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My comment was a referring to the last post I quoted: Youtube actively works to prevent the ripping of audio from videos
This is obviously not true, as @roosterburton explained.
Wouldn’t it be possible to let the plugin download the content on our device (PC, smartphone, whatever) and then upload that to the LingQ servers? I mean, we have accessed the YouTube video anywas, so…
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An update regarding YT importing:
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YouTube allow third parties to create plug ins for the YouTube Share feature so clearly it is not a closed system.
An iOS user can run a Python script to download a YouTube video. I don’t know if this uses a YouTube service, or just connects as per a HTML page that displays a video. Either way, Apple support Python script execution. No doubt Android and Windows do too. However, it is rather tedious.
It sounds like a good idea. But wouldn’t LingQ have to do the request using their server side architecture and thus use their IP address? And why would that work, when the current LingQ solution fails?
I can’t speak for the details, as I am not proficient in regards to network programming and architecture. @roosterburton probably knows better.
In regards to why something that could be possible doesn’t work in LingQ … honestly, I gave up wondering.
YTDLP relies on system modules for FFMPEG that are not accessible via browser extension / phone device etc. It is my understanding that LINGQ uses a setup like that where you send them the url and then YTDLP runs on their server and handles the audio extraction, conversion and whisper etc.
YouTube doesn’t natively provide mp3 files in their returned data meaning that Some sort of conversion of required before sending uploading it. (This is another LingQ limitation of not accepting video /non mp3/m4a files)
Everything required to download the full data is returned in a basic page request (could be initiated by the user) although the audio is generally protected by some sort of cipher. There are methods to extract the audio data client side but I won’t get into that here.
I generally like LINGQ and think the devs do a good job and it definitely helps my business that they would do something like that. But I don’t think the current solution is good for the platform.
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@roosterburton In light of recent developments, how will they affect the features of Rooster Playlist Importer? It looks like it won’t be able to import playlist w/o caption. But what about playlists with caption? Thanls
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All videos and import methods are still supported via the Rooster Import tool
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OK, I’m not Zoran, but: Videos with captions manually created by the author of the video can still be imported without any problems. It doesn’t work with automatically created captions, which doesn’t bother me. Because such captions are a nightmare anyway and useless for learning.
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The issue here is the 60mb limit for audio file import: lectures which I usually import into Lingq are long and, once converted into audio files, the size easily exceeds 60mb. This forces me to a laborious and long editing process to split them into parts and upload them individually. I would love to avoid this (if possible) by having an higher file size limit.
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@berilo1 We’ll see what can be done regarding this limit.
Regarding the issue with auto-generated subtitles (no captions found error), we made some breakthrough in solving this one too and I hope we will push a fix soon.
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Another update and (yet) again it has stopped working. I’m using a macbook and safari so a fairly standard set-up.
Do you actually test your updates on a standard set of machines before putting them out? It’s very frustrating for someone who just wants to use the import feature …
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We apologize for that.
The issue isn’t caused by something we did. Importing was working fine and no changes were made to it on our end. But, YouTube actively tries to prevent non-standard usage of their content. When this happens we are then required to adjust the way we do this. We are now working on another solution to grab the subtitles. We hope to have it ready soon. Thanks for your patience.
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Thanks for responding.
But isn’t it better in that case to stop offering import direct from youtube as a feature?
As a user I know the workaround is that I can grab the subtitles, import them separately and attach the appropriate url etc. Once a feature exists, my expectation is that it regularly works.
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How do you grab the subtitles from a YouTube video?
Videos with subtitles usually have a transcript button in the description. Clicking that will show the transcript with toggleable timestamps. You can copy and paste them.
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