Apologies for not filing a ticket earlier to track the work done so far here! The second part to fix videos imported with low quality remains open and @Amdrel is having a hard time reproducing, but @Prototyperspective has provided some pointers in this discussion thread: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist/W447 (thank you!)

@Amdrel

This revised list of 2k or so files from @Prototyperspective (thanks again!) may have better quality at source for half of the files:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?sort=create_timestamp_desc&search=deepcategory%3A%22Uploaded_with_video2commons%22+filewidth%3A640+filetype%3Avideo+insource%3Asource%3Dhttps%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3F&title=Special%3ASearch&profile=advanced&fulltext=1&ns6=1

Would it be possible to try to fix these? Then we can close this, and @Prototyperspective can file a followup wish that we can revisit in the future once we figure out a more scalable way to retroactively fix identified slices of low quality uploads.

I took a look at this query's 20 most recent results and 15/20 of the videos downloaded correctly. The remaining 5 videos are at a lower resolution than the original source. All of these improper videos were downloaded manually by the user prior to being uploaded to video2commons and were not fetched directly from YouTube directly by video2commons. Likely what happened was the manual method used to download these videos by users prior to uploading them to video2commons failed to download the full resolution versions. I downloaded each of these videos using yt-dlp and got the full resolution versions as we would hope would happen.

If users manually used yt-dlp or a similar tool to obtain these videos then it's possible that the lower resolution versions were downloaded due to the JS runtime not being properly configured to solve the challenge requests made by YouTube. This requires a bit of setup and is a new requirement imposed by yt-dlp. Also, one of the videos in the list is AI upscaled using YouTube's super resolution feature, and I'm not sure if we want to support that anyway. video2commons unfortunately gets blocked by YouTube occasionally and this could be causing users to download the videos via other means, resulting in poorer quality.

Thanks for looking it and sorry for not providing a set of affected files right away; here are some from the list of my uploads also linked at the talk page:

• 640x but 1920x when downloaded
• 640x but 1920 at source
• 640x but 854 at source
• 640x but 1920 at source

Thank you for the examples! I'm also running a script that should get a (mostly) complete list of videos with higher resolutions available. I'll update the thread with the list once it's complete.

The script finished and I found 135 videos in total that need re-uploads. Attached is a CSV file with the full list of titles and YouTube IDs. I excluded AI upscaled videos as well (new YouTube feature). It's actually a bit less than I expected.

It should be possible to write a script that automatically uploads new revisions of these, though I think by default only the original uploader can do that?

Edit: I didn't include files with greater than 640 width (480p) and less than 1280 width (720p) in this CSV. I can include those if needed. I noticed many files are missing from this. It's possible that yt-dlp isn't able to get the higher formats for many videos even on the latest version properly configured. If that's the case then there's only so much we can do.

Thank you @Amdrel ! cc: @Don-vip @Prototyperspective

I think we're running into a wall or rabbit hole for additional fixes of old videos. For additional slices of videos that need to be identified and fixed somehow, I can file another task (and wish) for tracking. We have to weigh continued investigation and fixes of old videos against other video2commons work we want to get to as there are still also many GitHub issues we want to investigate and fix.

Thanks you two! That's surprisingly few files Amdrel. If that's close to all they could be fixed manually. It would be great if you could put that on a new Commons report page where the file links are clickable and things are in columns of a wikitable. However, it seems to be very incomplete as all of the four example files list above (+this) are not included. yt-dlp does get the higher-res version for these so maybe you could adjust how the checking works. If there still are some issues, it would be great if you could file a corresponding yt-dlp issue. No, by default everybody can upload new file revisions and a script that uploads new versions of lots of files at once would be very useful – also for other issues if they occur.