youtube-dl is a small application written with python to download youtube provided media content like video and audio. What makes youtube-dl so popular are simple, works, and rich feature set. youtube-dl currently supports
- YouTube.com,
- Dailymotion
- Google Video
- Photobucket
- Yahoo
- Metacafe
- Depositfiles
- brightcove.com
- auengine.com
- RingTV
- instagram.com
- Jukebox
- 3sat
- CSpan
- …
We will look in detail how to use youtube-dl provided features. youtube-dl can run Windows, Linux like Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Mac OS X operating systems.
Download and Install youtube-dl
youtube-dl can be installed in different ways like pip, package manager, manual download, etc. We will look most easy and recent ways.
Windows
Windows binary can be downloaded from the link below. And installed with Next-Next standard windows installation way.
http://youtube-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl.exe
Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Mint, Kali)
Ubuntu and Debian packages can be installed with apt command like below.
$ apt install youtube-dl
Linux (Fedora)
We can install youtube-dl package from the rpm repositories with the yum command for Fedora, CentOS, Red Hat like below.
$ yum install youtube-dlPip
Pip provides operating system independent python package and library management. By using pip youtube-dl can be downloaded like below.
$ pip install youtube-dl
Install From Shell Directly
youtube-dl is also provided as directly install from the Linux bash shell. Just download with curl or wget command like below. Also with the chmod command the youtube-dl script will be made directly executable.
$ sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dlHelp
Youtube-dl has a long help page which contains all details of its features. The help page can be listed below. We will provide -h option like below.
$ youtube-dl -h
Man
Man page provides more detailed information about youtube-dl usage. Command man will only work on Linux distributions.
$ man youtube-dl
Update youtube-dl
youtube-dl can be updated in different ways which is mainly related to the installation method. If we have installed with a package manager like apt, yum, or pip we should use these tools to update. If we have installed manually following command can be used to update.
$ youtube-dl --updateDownload Video With Url
The most popular usage of youtube-dl is downloading videos by providing their URLs. While providing URLs to prevent bash related errors use double quote. This will download the video and save the most appropriate format to our local computer.
$ youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg"
Download Audio
If we are only interested in the audio part and not video part -x parameter will extract audio from video. The format will be mp3 in this situation.
$ youtube-dl -x "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg"
Download Playlist
YouTube provides videos as a playlist too where these videos are related. Youtube-dl can download playlist videos one by one like the following command.
$ youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg&list=PLH15HpR5qRsXcnfTOLOA3yYSd0CmYwOHS"
List Supported Video Formats
Youtube provides videos on different formats and resolutions. To get all formats and resolutions about a video -F option can be provided with URL like below.
$ youtube-dl -F "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg"
Download Video As Mp4
From supported formats list select mp4 extension and intended resolutions format code.
$ youtube-dl -f 22 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg"
Download Video As Webm
Similar to the mp4 example WebM format code should be provided from supported video formats.
$ youtube-dl -f 247 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg"
Download With All Subtitles
Some video service providers also provide subtitles about videos in different languages. These subtitles are low in size and can be downloaded like below.
$ youtube-dl --all-subs "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg"Download Batch File
Download file URLs can be provided from an interactive command line that we have done up to now or from a file. This file should contain links line by line like the example below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KsnFWejpQg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5g0udW223n
and downloads can be started like below.
$ youtube-dl -a mylist.txt
Bandwidth Limit
Downloading video files will consume a lot of bandwidth because of the video nature. To prevent network congestion bandwidth usage limit can be set for youtube-dl like below. -r 1000 sets bandwidth as 1000 byte/second.
$ youtube-dl -r 1000 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5g0udW2jMQ"
Resume Even Errors
Sometimes errors occur in different ways like video not available for your country or video is deleted. By default, this type of error will stop the download, especially in the playlist download. To prevent download stopping from errors -i option is provided to ignore errors.
$ youtube-dl -i "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J5g0udW2jMQ"