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Issue with GrabzIt Ruby Gem: "Invalid Video" Error on Specific YouTube URLs

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Hello,

I'm writing to report an issue I've encountered while using the GrabzIt Ruby gem to generate GIFs from YouTube video URLs.

I've added the gem to my application and am using the following code in my Rails console:

client = GrabzIt::Client.new("key-123", "secret-123")
url = 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgDNFQ2RaLQ'
options = GrabzIt::AnimationOptions.new
client.url_to_animation(url, options)
output_path = Rails.root.join('output_of_youtube_long_video.gif').to_s
client.save_to(output_path)

For some videos, this process works as expected, and a proper GIF is generated. However, for other public YouTube videos, the output is a still image with the text "Invalid Video."

This issue appears to be inconsistent across all videos. Here are examples of URLs that work and ones that do not:

URLs that worked:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ (Public YouTube video)
https://bk-staging.s3.amazonaws.com/videos/1sn68o2e87ugygfc725p35jgku4y (Public S3 video)

URLs that did not work (resulted in "Invalid Video" image):
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/KUM2p2Weicg (Public YouTube Shorts video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JgDNFQ2RaLQ (Public YouTube video)

My primary concern is why it's failing on a standard, public YouTube video like the last example. This suggests the issue is not limited to YouTube Shorts.

Could you please provide some insight into why this might be happening? Are there specific video properties or URL formats that the gem struggles with? Any guidance or solutions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

Asked by on the 23rd of September 2025

Unfortunately, due to YouTube blocking our requests, we can no longer reliably create GIFs from YouTube videos. While it may occasionally work with a new proxy, the service is inconsistent. For this reason, we no longer actively advertise this functionality.

Answered by on the 23rd of September 2025