Feature Request: Download a Portion of Video with youtube-dl

[progressive-galib]

Feature Request: Download a Portion of Video with youtube-dl

Description:
I would like to request a new feature for youtube-dl that allows users to download a specific portion of a video by specifying a start time and an end time. This feature would be particularly useful for users who want to download only a certain segment of a longer video.

Proposed Implementation:
One way to implement this feature could be by introducing additional command-line arguments, such as --start-time and --end-time, to youtube-dl. Users would provide the start and end times in the format "HH:MM:SS," and youtube-dl would download the video from the specified start time to the end time.

Suggested Behavior:

• Add an option to specify the start time and end time when downloading a video. For example:

youtube-dl --start-time 01:30 --end-time 02:00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID

[dirkf]

1. READ THIS BEFORE OPENING A NEW ISSUE! THIS MEANS YOU! #30839
2. Review is it possible to download only desired time interval? #4821

[progressive-galib]

it'd be really really nice to have it natively, do you mind if i implement it myself and submit a pull request ?

[dirkf]

As originally suggested in #4821, there isn't see a realistic way to do this internally: an implementation will have to rely on ffmpeg (or something similar).

You could review the --split-chapters function of yt-dlp and maybe adapt that, with some way of specifying the clip region in the yt-dl command line.

Probably better is what I suggested in #4821: back-port the NAME: modifier for the various --...-args ... options: then it's straightforward to formulate --external-downloader-args so that ffmpeg downloads just the wanted time range.

What happens now is ffmpeg -i URL ARGS DEST; if -ss ... is in the ARGS position the whole stream is downloaded.

What we want is ffmpeg -ss START -i URL -t DURATION ARGS DEST or ffmpeg -ss START -to END -i URL ARGS DEST. The latter can be specified in yt-dlp by '--downloader-args ffmpeg_i "-ss START -to END"`.

Also review stale PR #30850.