I downloaded a youtube stream with a tool i found on reddit. When I try to play it with VLC it tells me that the moov atom is missing. The file is ~110Mb so there is video data in it, I just don't know how to play it. Can anyone help?

The tool is called 'youtube-dl' and it looks like it used ffmpeg to download. And yes, I did google the error but none of the solutions worked for me.

youtube-dl works fine for me. You just have to update often (IOW don't use the one from your distros repo, install the newest via pip or alike), youtube seems to change things really fast.

But usually the download stops if something is wrong.

If you already downloaded the video (without errors reported by youtube-dl, I suppose), it seems to be a problem with the content, not with youtube-dl.

Have you tried converting the file to some other format, through ffmpeg or some other video tool?

@ddephor Okay after the stream has ended the mp4 became playable. One more question. Why did this program take >6 hours to download 23 minutes of video? I don't even know how long the stream was, because I didn't have time to look at it (that's why i used youtube-dl in the first place). While at uni, I took a quick look at the ffmpeg logs of the running downloader and it was downloading ~2 seconds of video per 16 seconds. Also the fps and the speed were below 1 in the logs.

@ddephor After trying the windows version I can confirm that it works. I dunno why the linux version was downloading so slow.

I found another tool that works way better than youtube-dl. It's called streamlink and it is also open source on github.

youtube-dl on debian works fine. And speed was never an issue for me, it takes about 5 seconds per minute of video.

Maybe a network issue? Some proxy slowing it down?

@ddephor I don't think so. I'm not using any proxies and I have a gigabit download speed. The alternative program I found looks like it's better for downloading live streams from the beginning.

I will probably use youtube-dl for downloading videos from the other *wide range of video sites* that it supports.