The re engine does not want to repeat an empty string, for fear that something like (.*)* could be matching the tokens ... "" "" "" "" "" "" Of course, that's harmless with a question mark, although still somewhat strange.
This reverts commit 6d0d573eca.
6d0d573eca
Add a test for the pages with the video_id in the URL.
If the URL has the video_id in it, use that since the current method of finding the id breaks on those pages. Fixes 2698.
Video url extraction failed for some videos, e.g. http://teamcoco.com/video/old-time-baseball The url extracted was also occasionally suboptimal quality, e.g. http://teamcoco.com/video/louis-ck-interview-george-w-bush
Some older videos contain an extra properties such as 'embed' before 'type'.