rg3/youtube-dl — pull request #565 by Chronial (2012-11-27 23:54:34+00:00)
Title: UnicodeEncodeError on WinXP

Youtube-dl will generate UnicodeErrors on WinXP when a video title contains weird unicode characters and an external process is invoked (ffmpeg, rtmpdump). For an example see bug #436.

I don’t think that’s easily fixable – the Subprocess module does not work properly with exotic unicode filenames, and I actually think none of the python2 process creation functions do (on win32). This is solvable by using an external module like Qt, but I think that is a little bit much.

As an easy solution is not available, I created a workaround, so youtube-dl is at least useable for videos with weird titles: I added a title format option "atitle", that contains the video title in ascii.