Ignore AI upscaled YouTube videos with yt‑dlp

Filter for formats that don’t include -sr (“super resolution”) in their format ID.

At the end of October, YouTube introduced a “feature” to do AI upscaling of low-resolution videos.

When you’re downloading a video with yt‑dlp, you can spot AI upscaled videos by looking for the -sr suffix in the format ID, or AI-upscaled in the format note. Here’s an example from a video uploaded in 2009:

$ yt‑dlp --list-formats 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N1_0SUGlDQ'
[info] Available formats for 0N1_0SUGlDQ:
ID     EXT   RESOLUTION FPS CH │   FILESIZE   TBR PROTO │ VCODEC          VBR ACODEC      ABR ASR MORE INFO
───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
sb2    mhtml 48x27        1    │                  mhtml │ images                                  storyboard
…
397    mp4   640x480     30    │    6.06MiB  306k https │ av01.0.04M.08  306k video only          480p, mp4_dash
247-sr webm  960x720     30    │   11.47MiB  578k https │ vp9            578k video only          720p, AI-upscaled, webm_dash
398-sr mp4   960x720     30    │    9.13MiB  461k https │ av01.0.05M.08  461k video only          720p, AI-upscaled, mp4_dash
248-sr webm  1440x1080   30    │   21.22MiB 1071k https │ vp9           1071k video only          1080p, AI-upscaled, webm_dash
399-sr mp4   1440x1080   30    │   18.46MiB  931k https │ av01.0.08M.08  931k video only          1080p, AI-upscaled, mp4_dash

Because yt‑dlp helpfully includes -sr in the format ID of AI upscaled videos, you can exclude them by adding a format filter.

• If you’re using the CLI, add the --format flag. For example:

  $ yt‑dlp "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N1_0SUGlDQ" \
      --format 'bestvideo*[format_id!*=-sr]+bestaudio/best[format_id!*=-sr]'
  

• If you’re embedding it in Python, add format to the options passed to YouTubeDL. For example:

  from yt_dlp import YoutubeDL
      
  ydl_opts = {"format": "bestvideo*[format_id!*=-sr]+bestaudio/best[format_id!*=-sr]"}
      
  with YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl:
      ydl.download(["https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0N1_0SUGlDQ"])
  

I’ve added the latter to my personal wrapper around yt‑dlp.