soimort/you-get · error · Exception

No video found in this playlist

Error message

No video found in this playlist

What it means

Raised as plain Exception at the end of icourses_playlist_new (src/you_get/extractors/icourses.py:166). This function walks the course's chapter/section tree (showSectionNode2 -> to_sec -> get_playlist) looking for videos; if no branch ever yields a non-empty vlist, the playlist is considered video-less.

Source

Thrown at src/you_get/extractors/icourses.py:166

            page = to_chap(hit.group(1), hit.group(2), hit.group(3))
            hit_list = re.findall(res_patt, page)
            if hit_list:
                return get_playlist(hit_list[0][0], hit_list[0][1])
            for hit in hit_list:
                print(hit)
        elif i[1] == 'showSectionNode2':
            hit = re.search(show_sec_patt, i[2])
            page = show_sec(hit.group(1), hit.group(2))
            # print(page)
            patt = r'ajaxtosection\(this,(\d+),(\d+),(\d+)\)'
            hit_list = re.findall(patt, page)
            # print(hit_list)
            for hit in hit_list:
                page = to_sec(hit[0], hit[1], hit[2])
                vlist = re.findall(res_patt, page)
                if vlist:
                    return get_playlist(vlist[0][0], vlist[0][1])
    raise Exception("No video found in this playlist")


def get_playlist(res_id, course_id):
    ep = 'http://www.icourses.cn/jpk/changeforVideo.action?resId={}&courseId={}'
    req = get_content(ep.format(res_id, course_id))

    patt = r'<a.+?changeforvideo\(\'(\d+)\',\'(\d+)\',\'(\d+)\'\).+?title=\"(.+?)\"'
    return re.findall(patt, req)


class ICousesExactor(object):
    PLAYER_BASE_VER = '150606-1'
    ENCRYPT_MOD_VER = '151020'
    ENCRYPT_SALT = '3DAPmXsZ4o'  # It took really long time to find this...

    def __init__(self, url):
        self.url = url
        self.title = ''

View on GitHub (pinned to 049548f3f3)

Solutions

  1. Open the course in a browser and confirm it actually has videos.
  2. Log each section page fetched in icourses_playlist_new and check whether res_patt (and the ajaxtosection/show_sec_patt regexes) still match the HTML; update them if the markup changed.
  3. Upgrade you-get for current icourses page structure.
Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Try / catch

try:
    icourses_playlist_download(url, output_dir)
except Exception as e:
    if str(e) == 'No video found in this playlist':
        verify_course_has_videos_in_browser(url)  # content question, not code
    else:
        raise

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: icourses_playlist_download hits the type-2 shared-course branch and icourses_playlist_new traverses all ajaxtosection(...) nodes, but every to_sec(...) page has no matches for res_patt; or the intermediate regexes (show_sec_patt etc.) fail so no section is even visited. The unconditional raise at function bottom then fires.

Common situations: Course that genuinely contains no downloadable videos (documents only); icourses markup/JS changes (ajaxtosection signature changed) so section pages parse empty; missing/garbled course data served to the scraper.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of soimort/you-get@049548f3f3 (2026-08-15). Data as JSON: /api/errors/d104bfb4e81515c8. Report an issue: GitHub.