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@@ -449,6 +449,14 @@ Since June 2012 (#342) youtube-dl is packed as an executable zipfile, simply unz To run the exe you need to install first the [Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable Package](http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=29). +### How can I detect whether a given URL is supported by youtube-dl? + +For one, have a look at the [list of supported sites](docs/supportedsites). Note that it can sometimes happen that the site changes its URL scheme (say, from http://example.com/v/1234567 to http://example.com/v/1234567 ) and youtube-dl reports an URL of a service in that list as unsupported. In that case, simply report a bug. + +It is *not* possible to detect whether a URL is supported or not. That's because youtube-dl contains a generic extractor which maches **all** URLs. You may be tempted to disable, exclude, or remove the generic extractor, but the generic extractor not only allows users to extract videos from lots of websites that embed a video from another service, but may also be used to extract video from a service that it's hosting itself. Therefore, we neither recommend nor support disabling, excluding, or removing the generic extractor. + +If you want to find out, simply call youtube-dl. If you get no videos back, chances are the URL is either not referring to a video or unsupported. You can find out which by examining the output (if you run youtube-dl on the console) or catching an `UnsupportedError` exception if you run it from a Python program. + # DEVELOPER INSTRUCTIONS Most users do not need to build youtube-dl and can [download the builds](http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html) or get them from their distribution. |