What causes "The webpage doesn't contain any video" in ytdl-org/youtube-dl?

Open the URL in a browser to confirm it still hosts a video.

ytdl-org/youtube-dl · error · ExtractorError

The webpage doesn't contain any video

Error message

The webpage doesn't contain any video

What it means

Raised by the RTVE infantil/infantil-series extractor when the downloaded webpage contains no data-location="alacarta_videos" attribute, i.e. the page exposes no alacarta URL to delegate to RTVEALaCartaIE. Expected=True.

Source

Thrown at youtube_dl/extractor/rtve.py:265

            'id': '3069778',
            'ext': 'mp4',
            'title': 'Documentos TV - La revolución del móvil',
            'duration': 3496.948,
        },
        'params': {
            'skip_download': True,
        },
    }

    def _real_extract(self, url):
        page_id = self._match_id(url)
        webpage = self._download_webpage(url, page_id)

        alacarta_url = self._search_regex(
            r'data-location="alacarta_videos"[^<]+url&quot;:&quot;(http://www\.rtve\.es/alacarta.+?)&',
            webpage, 'alacarta url', default=None)
        if alacarta_url is None:
            raise ExtractorError(
                'The webpage doesn\'t contain any video', expected=True)

        return self.url_result(alacarta_url, ie=RTVEALaCartaIE.ie_key())

View on GitHub (pinned to 956b8c5855)

Solutions

Open the URL in a browser to confirm it still hosts a video.
If the content moved, find the new alacarta URL and use it directly (it will be handled by RTVEALaCartaIE).
If the page is fine in a browser, the marker attribute changed - update youtube-dl / the regex.

Defensive patterns

Strategy: try-catch

Try / catch

try:
    ydl.extract_info(url)
except ExtractorError as e:
    if "doesn't contain any video" in str(e):
        skip(url)  # no alacarta delegate target on the page
    else:
        raise

Prevention

Confirm the infantil page still embeds a player in a browser.
Prefer direct /alacarta/ URLs when you have them - they skip this delegation step entirely.
Update youtube-dl if RTVE changed the data-location markup.

When it happens

Trigger: Extracting an rtve.es/infantil URL (or any URL handled by this IE) whose HTML lacks the data-location alacarta marker - removed episodes, non-video pages, or pages served in a different markup to the downloader.

Common situations: Expired children's-content pages after RTVE restructured the section; URL falls through to this IE because the more specific IEs did not match.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of ytdl-org/youtube-dl@956b8c5855 (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/2cfd595ca00f115f. Report an issue: GitHub.