ytdl-org/youtube-dl · warning · ExtractorError

There's no video in this tweet.

Error message

There's no video in this tweet.

What it means

Raised by TwitterIE when a tweet contains no recognized video binding values and no expanded URL in status.entities.urls[0] — i.e. the tweet is text/image only and there is nothing to download. Notably this ExtractorError is NOT marked expected=True, so youtube-dl logs it as a regular extraction error rather than a benign 'no video' notice.

Source

Thrown at youtube_dl/extractor/twitter.py:572

                        if not image_url or '/player-placeholder' in image_url:
                            continue
                        thumbnails.append({
                            'id': suffix[1:] if suffix else 'medium',
                            'url': image_url,
                            'width': int_or_none(image.get('width')),
                            'height': int_or_none(image.get('height')),
                        })

                    info.update({
                        'formats': formats,
                        'thumbnails': thumbnails,
                        'duration': int_or_none(get_binding_value(
                            'content_duration_seconds')),
                    })
            else:
                expanded_url = try_get(status, lambda x: x['entities']['urls'][0]['expanded_url'])
                if not expanded_url:
                    raise ExtractorError("There's no video in this tweet.")
                info.update({
                    '_type': 'url',
                    'url': expanded_url,
                })
        return info


class TwitterAmplifyIE(TwitterBaseIE):
    IE_NAME = 'twitter:amplify'
    _VALID_URL = r'https?://amp\.twimg\.com/v/(?P<id>[0-9a-f\-]{36})'

    _TEST = {
        'url': 'https://amp.twimg.com/v/0ba0c3c7-0af3-4c0a-bed5-7efd1ffa2951',
        'md5': '7df102d0b9fd7066b86f3159f8e81bf6',
        'info_dict': {
            'id': '0ba0c3c7-0af3-4c0a-bed5-7efd1ffa2951',
            'ext': 'mp4',
            'title': 'Twitter Video',

View on GitHub (pinned to 956b8c5855)

Solutions

  1. Confirm the tweet actually contains video (play it in a browser); if not, skip such URLs in your pipeline.
  2. If the tweet does have video, update youtube-dl / use yt-dlp — Twitter's markup changed repeatedly and old scrapers miss entities.
  3. For image tweets, download images directly (youtube-dl does not handle plain images).
  4. Pre-filter URLs with a check of oembed metadata before invoking the extractor.
Defensive patterns

Strategy: validation

Validate before calling

import requests
o = requests.get('https://publish.twitter.com/oembed', params={'url': tweet_url}).json()
if '<video' not in o.get('html', '') and 'video' not in o.get('type', ''):
    skip(tweet_url, 'no media in tweet')

Type guard

def tweet_has_video(status: dict) -> bool:
    urls = ((status.get('entities') or {}).get('urls') or [])
    return any('video_info' in (bv or {}) for bv in status.get('extended_entities', {}).get('media', [])) or bool(urls)

Try / catch

try:
    ydl.extract_info(tweet_url)
except ExtractorError as e:
    if "no video in this tweet" in str(e):
        continue  # benign: text/image tweet in a batch list
    else:
        raise

Prevention

When it happens

Trigger: Extracting a tweet whose entities contain neither video_info/animated_gif bindings nor any expanded_url (plain text tweet, image-only tweet, or a Twitter API/HTML change that hides entities from the extractor).

Common situations: Feeding status URLs for text/image tweets into batch scripts, tweet permalink without media, Twitter frontend changes breaking entity scraping in old builds.

Related errors

AI-assisted analysis of ytdl-org/youtube-dl@956b8c5855 (2026-08-14). Data as JSON: /api/errors/c8ac27e7223a231c. Report an issue: GitHub.