Add cover art and other metadata to downloaded files by TobiGr · Pull Request #13023 · TeamNewPipe/NewPipe

TobiGr · 2026-01-09T02:16:53Z

What is it?

Feature (user facing) ⚠️ Your PR must target the refactor branch

Description of the changes in your PR

This PR adds support for thumbnails / cover arts for downloaded mp3, mp4 and opus/ogg files.
Metadata support for mp3 and mp4 files is also added. Side note: mp4/MPEG-4 sucks implementation wise because there are a lot of magic bytes.

This PR fixes the image tags in DescriptionFragments which previously displayed the image dimensions using height x width. This has been changed to the commonly used format width x height.

To do

⚠️ This PR is in an early stage as is supposed to be used for testing only atm.

Changes need to be tested with different players and devices
mp4 changes are not trivial and need to be tested in detail
fetch cover art properly and use reliable async implementation.
Add SPDX-License identifier to new files
Add more documentation to make the postprocessing more understandable
Enable users to disabled metadata embedding

Before/After Screenshots/Screen Record

File format	Preview (before)	Metadata (before)	Metadata (after)
opus+vorbis/ogg/oga	none / file icon	comment, title, artist, genre, date	comment, title, artist, genre, date, album, tracknumber, preformer, organization, copyright
mp3	none / file icon	-	comment, title, artist, genre, date, album, tracknumber, preformer, organization, copyright
mp4	(first frame)	-	title, artist, genre, date, label, copyright
mp4 - from dash	(first frame)	title, artist, genre, date	title, artist, genre, date, label, copyright

Fixes the following issue(s)

Closes #4341

Relies on the following changes

Add SongMetadata for YouTube Music NewPipeExtractor#1452

APK testing

The APK can be found by going to the "Checks" tab below the title. On the left pane, click on "CI", scroll down to "artifacts" and click "app" to download the zip file which contains the debug APK of this PR. You can find more info and a video demonstration on this wiki page.

Due diligence

I read the contribution guidelines.
The proposed changes follow the AI policy.
I tested the changes using an emulator or a physical device.

Notice regarding AI usage

AI (ChatGPT 5 mini) was used to generate some helpers and especially to write Mp4Metadata to correctly adjust the existing udta and following boxes when inserting new data into udta.

cynthia2006 · 2026-01-15T16:09:07Z

Using the debug build of NewPipe with this commit resulted in the following exception, perhaps due to thumbnail size overflowing the limits of an OGG page.

Exception

User Action: download post-processing
Request: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gY1WyUIabCc [ {type=audio format=WebM Opus bitrate=160} ]
Content Country: IN
Content Language: en-IN
App Language: en_IN
Service: YouTube
Timestamp: 2026-01-15T18:10:37.835+05:30
Package: org.schabi.newpipe.debug.downloadermeta
Service: YouTube
Version: 0.28.0
OS: Linux samsung/m35xins/m35x:16/BP2A.250605.031.A3/M356BXXU5CYI8:user/release-keys 16 - 36

Crash log

java.lang.UnsupportedOperationException: page size is 73906 but cannot be larger than 65025
	at org.schabi.newpipe.streams.OggFromWebMWriter.addPacketSegment(OggFromWebMWriter.java:519)
	at org.schabi.newpipe.streams.OggFromWebMWriter.build(OggFromWebMWriter.java:214)
	at us.shandian.giga.postprocessing.OggFromWebmDemuxer.process(OggFromWebmDemuxer.java:41)
	at us.shandian.giga.postprocessing.Postprocessing.run(Postprocessing.java:195)
	at us.shandian.giga.get.DownloadMission.doPostprocessing(DownloadMission.java:718)
	at us.shandian.giga.get.DownloadMission.$r8$lambda$IA0_L2vJSLZLqg0BQARF8wvRshk(Unknown Source:0)
	at us.shandian.giga.get.DownloadMission$$ExternalSyntheticLambda0.run(D8$$SyntheticClass:0)
	at java.lang.Thread.run(Thread.java:1119)

TobiGr · 2026-02-06T15:14:03Z

thanks for testing. I added thumbnail compression and resizing to make thumbnails always fit into one page. Another solution would be to make the metadata spread over multiple pages. I tried to implement this, but was not successful. I ended up receiving corrupted files which does not make things better).

cynthia2006 · 2026-02-06T18:25:37Z

Maybe compressing thumbnails isn't the best idea, and we should rather span the data across multiple Ogg pages? That would be on par what libraries like mutagen do, which is used in yt-dlp.

cynthia2006 · 2026-02-06T18:28:13Z

Besides, it would be neat if we could extract song metadata from the description (with regular expressions) to support YouTube Music. YTDLnis for example does this already using yt-dlp underneath.

TobiGr · 2026-02-06T22:35:26Z

Another solution would be to make the metadata spread over multiple pages. I tried to implement this, but was not successful. I ended up receiving corrupted files which does not make things better).

It turned out that I did not fill the last comment page correctly. This works now as expected and high res thumbnails / cover arts are used.

cynthia2006 · 2026-02-07T04:28:24Z

As a preliminary example, this regular expression could be used to extract information from the description of YouTube Music videos.

YTMUSIC_RE = r'''Provided to YouTube by (?P<label>.+)

.+\u00b7\s(?P<artist>\w+)

(?P<title>.+)

.+

Released on: (?P<date>[\d-]+)''')

Live Example.

TobiGr · 2026-02-08T13:18:34Z

I now added support for non-dash mp4 downloads which are e.g. served by PeerTube.

Metadata for songs from YouTube are used now, too. However, YouTube does not provide sqaure thumbnails for YouTube Music streams. ~~This causes album covers to look wrong.~~ YT Music cover arts are now cropped to squares.

TobiGr · 2026-02-09T21:17:26Z

Metadata and cover art are now added to mp3 files, too

ghost · 2026-02-10T06:55:55Z

+    fun getGenre(): String? = if (songInfo?.genre?.isEmpty() == false) {
+        songInfo.genre
+    } else {
+        streamInfo.category
+    }


I know it is raw and it is not time for review and etc. I probably just won't open it again so comment now.
All these if which checks for isEmpty/isBlank providing default value can be replaced with ifEmpty/ifBlank one liners sonfInfo?.genre?.ifEmpty { songInfo.category }

ghost · 2026-02-10T07:20:14Z

What media player is recommended for testing? Because vlc weirdly doesn't see cover (while stock gallery app sees it)

TobiGr · 2026-02-21T17:53:06Z

I can see thumbnails for video and audio files in VLC. Are they enabled in your VLC settings (settings > Interface > Video thumbnails)?

height x width was used before which is an uncommon order.

Copyright, record label, album, label, ...

Extract MP4 metadata (udta) generation into separate helper class

Serialization is attempted if something crashes. Bitmap cannot be serialized.

Metadata embedding is disabled by default across all post-processing algorithms. A new parameter and variable is introduced although there is the parameter 'args' already. The information on whether the metadata is going to be embedded needs to be parsed by every audio or video post-processing algorithm anyway. Getting it from the list is more difficult and less error-prone than creating a new param.

Update NewPipe Extractor for SongMetadata support

ghost · 2026-02-25T16:11:18Z

I can see thumbnails for video and audio files in VLC. Are they enabled in your VLC settings (settings > Interface > Video thumbnails)?

Yeah it is enabled. I also hope we are both talking about androids vlc

If you previously read the message or read it on email from github notifications, don't mind it. Your PR wasn't guilty for the crash

TobiGr added feature request Issue is related to a feature in the app downloader Issue is related to the downloader labels Jan 9, 2026

github-actions bot added the size/large PRs with less than 750 changed lines label Jan 9, 2026

TobiGr changed the title ~~Add support for more cover arts / thumbnails and other metadata for mp4 and opus/ogg downloads~~ Add support for cover art and other metadata for mp4 and ogg downloads Jan 9, 2026

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch 5 times, most recently from dbdd1dc to 3ebf7c7 Compare January 9, 2026 05:25

TobiGr mentioned this pull request Jan 9, 2026

Add metadata while downloading files #4341

Open

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch from 3ebf7c7 to c5b1737 Compare January 9, 2026 14:20

TobiGr changed the title ~~Add support for cover art and other metadata for mp4 and ogg downloads~~ Add support for cover art and other metadata for mp4 and opus downloads Jan 10, 2026

TobiGr changed the title ~~Add support for cover art and other metadata for mp4 and opus downloads~~ Support cover art and other metadata in mp4 and opus downloads Jan 10, 2026

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TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch from c5b1737 to 9e97b67 Compare February 6, 2026 15:11

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch 2 times, most recently from a2ff809 to 1eea521 Compare February 6, 2026 17:37

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch 2 times, most recently from cef47ae to 9e6454f Compare February 6, 2026 22:34

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch 2 times, most recently from 100e315 to 95d1997 Compare February 6, 2026 23:21

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch 2 times, most recently from f17b5ae to 1de6b44 Compare February 8, 2026 12:52

github-actions bot added the size/giant PRs with more than 750 changed lines label Feb 8, 2026

github-actions bot removed the size/large PRs with less than 750 changed lines label Feb 8, 2026

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch from 1de6b44 to 9b1e177 Compare February 8, 2026 13:16

TobiGr changed the title ~~Support cover art and other metadata in mp4 and opus downloads~~ Support cover art and other metadata in mp4 and ogg downloads Feb 8, 2026

TobiGr changed the title ~~Support cover art and other metadata in mp4 and ogg downloads~~ Add cover art and other metadata to downloaded files Feb 9, 2026

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch 2 times, most recently from 282fced to 41c6bb0 Compare February 9, 2026 21:16

ghost reviewed Feb 10, 2026

View reviewed changes

TobiGr added 16 commits February 22, 2026 20:43

Small code improvement

64be2f8

Add support for cover art / thumbnail for ogg downloads

ffb9308

Add metadata fields to MP4 downloads

2b8cf0c

Add thumbnail / cover art to mp4 downloads

e16fa74

Add documentation and replace magic numbers by constants

50a04b1

Span metadata about multiple pages if needed

8267568

Use high quality images

65d2cdd

[DescriptionFragment] Fix thumbnail size: width x height

8b95209

height x width was used before which is an uncommon order.

Add more metadata fields to OGG and MP4 downloads

d0a60fa

Copyright, record label, album, label, ...

Remove transient keyword from static constants

fb2bcc7

Add metadata to mp4 files that usually would not need postprocessing

70b5be6

Extract MP4 metadata (udta) generation into separate helper class

Crop YouTube Music album covers

9e51c14

Make Bitmap transient

5d550a6

Serialization is attempted if something crashes. Bitmap cannot be serialized.

Add metadata and cover art to mp3 files

b904679

DO NOT MERGE: Update extractor to local fork for SongMetadata

eb36bca

Update NewPipe Extractor for SongMetadata support

TobiGr force-pushed the downloader-meta branch from ee5f52e to eb36bca Compare February 22, 2026 19:47

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What is it?

Description of the changes in your PR

To do

Before/After Screenshots/Screen Record

Fixes the following issue(s)

Relies on the following changes

APK testing

Due diligence

Notice regarding AI usage

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cynthia2006 commented Jan 15, 2026

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