youtube-dl.md

HuHa's youtube-dl Tips

Author: [email protected]

License: GNU Free Documentation License

Modern replacement: yt-dlp

Try installing package yt-dlp from your distro.

Install youtube-dl

YouTube keeps changing their web site all the time, so you need the latest youtube-dl, not one from a 3 years old Linux distribution that rarely, if ever, gets updated.

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl
sudo chmod 755 youtube-dl

If wget is not available, use curl:

cd /usr/local/bin
sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o youtube-dl
sudo chmod 755 youtube-dl

See also

https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html

Update!

If you haven't used it for a couple of days, always update it:

sudo youtube-dl --update

Default Call: Best Video, Best Audio

Don't forget the quotes, otherwise the shell will try to expand the ? wildcard and throw an error "no matches found".

youtube-dl 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...'

You might want to update the file's timestamp to just now:

touch ...

Get Only the Audio as MP3

youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...'

You might want to edit the ID3 tags with a good tool like kid3:

kid3 *.mp3

Check what Formats are Available for the Video

youtube-dl -F 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...'

Select a Specific Format

Pick the video and the audio format from the -F output and combine them like this:

youtube-dl -f '244+251' ''https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...'

Important: Video format first, then the audio format!

Limit Video Resolution, but Auto-Select Formats

To download max. 720p to keep the video size down:

youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[height<=720]+bestaudio' 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=...'

This doesn't seem to work anymore.

Reference

• youtube-dl GitHub Repo + Docs:

  https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/

• Examples in the docs:

  https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#format-selection-examples