[fbacher]

Good Progress on migrating to yt-dlp for the upcoming script.module.yt-dlp addon. This are a bit of a mess and I have done very limited testing, but I am hoping to have something deliverable in several weeks. Since the addon name will be different, other addons will not have a nasty surprise and will have opportunity to test and get fixes before switching. I had to make more changes to the code (YoutubeDLWrapper, etc.) than I like, but I found several things that had to be changed.

Unfortunately I found some problems in yt-dlp & youtube-dl that are greatly aggravated by Kodi's utf-8 hack for Turkish (but the 'fix' impacts many codesets). Most likely, this will prevent you from downloading any file with names that are non-ASCII. There are circumstances where non-ASCII content may cause trouble as well. I started hacking yt-dlp to see how difficult it would be to fix, but it is a very sizable chunk. There is code to attempt to address it, probably put in for Unicode Migration, but there are bugs and inconsistencies that likely only show up in stress situations such as these.

For the curious: the problem is that there is encoding for the contents of a file, that we all know and love. There is also encoding for the file name, which depends upon what the OS allows. Nearly all OS's these days support utf-8 for both file names and content. During startup Python does some magic and set up default encodings for file names as well as regular strings. The hack for Kodi disabled these, causing the default encoding for file names to be ASCII. The default (nearly) can not be changed after startup, but the consequences of changing it are bad, so don't go down that route. The default encoding for strings is utf-8, but there are some warts on the locale.