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YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

989 points by h43k3r 11y ago

Kristine1975 11y ago
I've been using it for years now and it's great. Not only for Youtube videos, but also for a lot of other video hosters, up to and including TV stations such as the German ZDF or the French Arte. To fully use its features you should install ffmpeg though. Youtube-dl will automatically use it if it's in the PATH, and then can download Youtube videos with higher frame rates and resolutions (they store video and audio in separate files, and ffmpeg is used to mux both together). ffmpeg is also required to download from some streaming video hosters. For me it's essentially: youtube-dl -F '<url>' to get the list of available video and audio formats, followed by youtube-dl -f <video format>+<audio format> '<url>' and then wait for the download to complete. And youtube-dl -U to self-update youtube-dl (because it gets updated just about every day).
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- awqrre 11y ago
  I like this command to extract audio from youtube videos: youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <url>
  - DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
    Or you could use -x, which would only download the audio (because there's seperate audio and video streams on youtube).
    - awqrre 11y ago
      yes -x is the same as --extract-audio, but I use an alias in my bashrc like this (if you don't use --audio-format mp3, you might not get mp3 (not necessarily a bad thing)): alias youtubemp3='youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3'
  - melicerte 11y ago
    That's my main use of youtube-dl for years now. I'm extracting audio from old french movies available on youtube, work a small sound extract with audacity and then post the result on soudcloud[1]. [1] A bit of self-promotion here, if you are interested this is my soundcloud playlist https://soundcloud.com/melicerte/sets/extraits-de-vieux-films https://soundcloud.com/melicerte/sets/extraits-de-vieux-film...
    - wingerlang 11y ago
      Why?
      - luxpir 11y ago
        Why not!
        wingerlang 11y ago
        I'm not against it or anything, I'm just wondering if it is a personal interest or if there is some niche usage I am unaware of.
    - x0 11y ago
      That is a really cool playlist.
  - rg3 11y ago
    If your music player supports OGG, you can also use youtube-dl -f FORMAT VIDEO_URL and give a numeric format that corresponds to a DASH webm audio-only stream, with vorbis audio (e.g. format 171 these days). The container is webm but it can be trivially changed to OGG with ffmpeg, which you can call via --exec automatically. Edit: I mentioned that because you don't lose any quality reencoding.
  - otterpro 11y ago
    I like to keep it in original audio format (usually AAC) instead of mp3, because with mp3 conversion, there is also some loss of quality due to re-compression.
- reacweb 11y ago
  $ youtube-dl -U It looks like you installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball. Please use that to update. TIL: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html
- ubercow 11y ago
  you can also do youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio '<url>' to skip a step, since 90% of the time that's what I want anyways.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    That's been the default since April 2015,so `youtube-dl url...` is sufficient to get either the best single-file video (if no ffmpeg installed or non-youtube video) or to get both the best video and the best audio remuxed.
- pilif 11y ago
  -f also supports some symbolic names, which is very handy because it allows you to easily get the best possible quality without having to check the formats every time: -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]' this is what I'm using in my case (on youtube). Posting this here, because it's not obvious from the docs that this works.
  - masklinn 11y ago
    FWIW > Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as default format selection […] If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to best and results in downloading the best available quality served as a single file. best is also needed for videos that don't come from YouTube because they don't provide the audio and video in two different files.
    - pilif 11y ago
      bestvideo+bestaudio has been flip-flopping ver time and releases between mp4 and webm though. As I'm mostly using this for consumption on an iPad, I prefer mp4, so I'm happy to have found a way to get the best possible mp4 version without having to go format hunting.
  - dstryr 11y ago
    I'm pretty sure the '-f best' setting is the default for updated versions of ytdl, so no real need for that.
    - Kristine1975 11y ago
      Unless you always want to download the best mp4, not webm (or vice versa).
- oxplot 11y ago
  > Not only for Youtube videos, but also for a lot of other video hosters Oh ye, the list's pretty comprehensive actually [1]. [1]: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext...
personjerry 11y ago
I feel like "ultimate" in the title is misleading.
- deleted 11y ago
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danso 11y ago
Mostly OT: A friend of mine posted this article from his local newspaper as an example of how slow news is in his town: http://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/what-is-a-gif/article_c1d84944-e92a-11e5-a095-eb219cc6cd71.html http://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/what-is-a-gif/... > What is a GIF? > OTTUMWA — Chances are if you have been on the Internet lately, you have encountered a GIF...In honor of National Teen Tech Week, the Ottumwa Public Library offered a session on GIF making for local teens Saturday afternoon. OK, not a traditional article topic for a newspaper, but the library described seems to be very much on the ball, teaching teens how to use youtube-dl to download movies: > He walked each of the teens through the steps required for making GIFs by using movie trailers found on YouTube. He then had the kids copy the web address and use the program youtube-dl to download the video. OPL also provided flash drives for each person so they could access the program at home.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  Don't knock gif, it's still used a lot on image boards[1] and most likely Facebook etc, too. Knowing how to make them can be quite useful for today's teens. [1] E.g. 4chan, which even has its own boards just for animated gifs: /gif/ (NSFW) and /wsg/ (SFW)
  - 746F7475 11y ago
    But most content on /wsg/ is webm these days
  - kragniz 11y ago
    These days it's all about the webms, though. Luckily youtube-dl is even more useful for that.
    - raihansaputra 11y ago
      but manually downloading each image/webm in a thread is not fun. i resort to use httrack and it works wonderfully.
- daveloyall 11y ago
jtokoph 11y ago
Some of the things that make this the 'ultimate': - Supports hundreds of services, not just youtube [0] - Allows you to extract audio in multiple formats - Download entire playlists (and general batch support) - Configure video/audio quality - Extract/build metadata - Cross platform [0] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html
- zavi 11y ago
  - Illegal
  - gayprogrammer 11y ago
    How is this illegal?
  - vbit 11y ago
    Not illegal perhaps but violates the TOS
    - zwetan 11y ago
      how enforceable is the TOS ? once something is published on the internet then it is assumed it can be viewed / copied / downloaded / etc. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping , the legal issues part.
      - vbit 11y ago
        Copyright is different and enforceable - see what RIAA did to some downloaders.
    - izacus 11y ago
      Unless your legislation explicitly grants you that right in a way that cannot be overriden by ToS.
  - reacweb 11y ago
diegorbaquero 11y ago
I used this years ago to create a Youtube2MP3 site. This tool is great. Nice to see that it's still alive and maintained
- visarga 11y ago
  Second this. I use it to make mp3 playlists. I don't bother too much with mp3's nowadays, but there is a second good reason to download: it's because YouTube bookmarked videos might disappear suddenly. If you want to make sure they remain accessible, you have to download them.
leni536 11y ago
Note that mpv integrates well with youtube-dl. With an "open with" like addon it's relly handy especially on sites that are still stuck on flash.
bfung 11y ago
If you use mac, it's available on homebrew. even easier.
extrapolar 11y ago
Note that it is against YouTube's ToS to download videos: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms "You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content."
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- jmnicolas 11y ago
  So what do they propose for someone that has a slow internet connection and can't watch streaming videos ? I have a NUC server at my parents house (they have a fast connection) where I connect remotely and make all my downloads. When I visit them I bring an external HD with me.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  So if I never agreed to those terms, I'm in the clear?
  - Nadya 11y ago
    You agree to the terms by using the Service - not when making an account. I think something could be said about how an agreement of that manner is not legally binding so you can ignore it, but IANAL. Just a faint memory something from the legality of TOS and maybe I'm not remembering it right. I place my confidence at 85% for "not legally enforceable". It has to be brought to your attention and usually that step is when creating an account. I'm also not sure if "please do not use the Service" is equivalent to "you may not use the Service". It's a request, not a demand. But I'm not sure if that sort of pedantic attitude would slide in court. Regardless - Google/YouTube aren't enforcing this so I don't think it matters from a legal standpoint - just a moral one. >By using or visiting the YouTube website or any YouTube products, software, data feeds, and services provided to you on, from, or through the YouTube website (collectively the "Service") you signify your agreement to (1) these terms and conditions (the "Terms of Service"), (2) Google's Privacy Policy, found at http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy and incorporated herein by reference, and (3) YouTube's Community Guidelines, found at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines and also incorporated herein by reference. If you do not agree to any of these terms, the Google Privacy Policy, or the Community Guidelines, please do not use the Service.
guycook 11y ago
The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard drive", "download youtube videos" et al). The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just because they wanted to save a video is ridiculous.
- baldfat 11y ago
  I treat youtube-dl like Fight Club. I am glad it isn't on the top of searches since I am afraid sites would start trying to stop it from working harder.
  - dexterdog 11y ago
    They already do. That's why it updates pretty much every time I do a homebrew update.
    - baldfat 11y ago
      I should have said. They would try harder.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  - haddr 11y ago
    I hope you haven't voted this article then. Let's keep it secret ;)
  - samstave 11y ago
    Exactly! SHHH - dont talk about ytdl... obv if the masses start talking about things like this, then sites like YT will go on the attack. WE DO NOT WANT THIS.
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    I don't know what parent is talking about, this script it's already very popular. I found it years ago and it wasn't difficult to find on google. Something worth mentioning is that the script works with dozens and dozens of video sites (or just sites with regular video content). Almost any video you throw at it gets downloaded. When something breaks it's usually fixed within days. It's a great piece of work.
joeyspn 11y ago
Download mp3 with the maximum possible quality. $ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" <URL>
- mrspeaker 11y ago
  Also, a lot of times I'll quickly grab videos from my youtube subs to listen to while I jog: if it's a video then the screen would stay on, so I just grab the audio with `youtube-dl -f 140 <URL>.` This downloads just an m4a that works on my iPhone. It's not ALWAYS format 140 (-F to see them all) but usually.
corradio 11y ago
I actually made a small script to download offline youtube videos using youtube-dl. https://github.com/corradio/watchlater https://github.com/corradio/watchlater https://oliviercorradi.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/3/ https://oliviercorradi.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/3/
em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
Initial commit is from 2008. I think title should be updated to reflect the initial year, since this is not a new project. I've been personally using this for many years.
- rg3 11y ago
  Actually, the project started as far back as 2006 and moved to git in 2008, hence the first commit having that date. I don't remember the exact day I started the project, but on freshcode (formerly freshmeat), the first listed version is 2006.08.08.
  - em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
    thank you. I was careful to word my sentence to not imply that the project was necessarily started in 2008.
lottin 11y ago
The only thing that irritates me about youtube-dl is that by default it will try download audio and video tracks separately and then remux them on your computer. While it's a cool feature, I don't think this is what most people want 99% of the time.
- brigade 11y ago
  Most of the time I've seen this come up in non-technical circles, the person wanted an MP3 to put in their library.
- pja 11y ago
  That’s because the best quality streams are delivered that way by Google so if you want the higher quality video+audio you have to download them separately and remux them locally.
- asddubs 11y ago
  Don't know why this is being downvoted. VLC can play .part files of many formats, but not if they're seperate streams. I wish there was a way to just download the highest format that will download only one file.
  - clarry 11y ago
    -f best It's in the documentation.
    - asddubs 11y ago
      no, that's the highest format, not the highest format that will download in one file, as opposed to two which have to be merged, meaning playing .part files is impossible
      - clarry 11y ago
        Are you saying the documentation is wrong? And not once but twice: You can also use special names to select particular edge case format: * best: Select best quality format represented by single file with video and audio And again: > Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as default format selection (see #5447, #5456). If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to best and results in downloading the best available quality served as a single file
aguynamedben 11y ago
Been using it for a while. Great for hacks, downloading 360 VR videos, downloading all videos for a channel. Was happy to see it here, it's nothing new, just a great tool, great job of surfacing it HN!
konart 11y ago
I'm amazed many people do not know about it, considering it is installed via brew together with mpv, lol.
jayadeeptp 11y ago
Isn't it against the ToS of Youtube to download videos?
- Crespyl 11y ago
  Technically, yes, but what do you think is happening when you watch a video from their site?
SG- 11y ago
Here's something i've added to my .bashrc that lets me type in simply 'play <some song name>' using youtube-dl and mplayer (I forget where I found this gem, and sorry for weird formatting, won): function play { youtube-dl --default-search=ytsearch: \ --youtube-skip-dash-manifest \ --output="${TMPDIR:-/tmp/}%(title)-s%(id)s.%(ext)s" \ --restrict-filenames \ --format="bestaudio[ext!=webm]" \ --exec=mplayer -vvv "$*" } play rick astley never gonna give you up
- tombrossman 11y ago
  One very minor annoyance I had was using it with BBC iPlayer. It works, but downloads the video as many dozens of tiny parts to reassemble. Since I use ~/Desktop as my default downloads folder, I created this to keep my desktop uncluttered while it runs: ytdl() { mkdir /tmp/ytdl && cd /tmp/ytdl for item in "$@" ; do youtube-dl "$@" ; done ; mv /tmp/ytdl/* ~/Desktop/ rm -rf /tmp/ytdl exit } Now I can Ctrl + Alt + T a new Terminal window, type ytdl http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/... (can use multiple links) then minimise the window and move on to other things.
  - porsupah 11y ago
    Wouldn't get_iplayer be simpler? http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html
  - ekimekim 11y ago
    Have you considered opening an issue? Using the current directory as a temp directory seems like something that should be fixed, or at least made configurable.
- Yenrabbit 11y ago
  This is brilliant! Thank you :) although I renamed it to yplay, since play is already used on my system.
- Cyph0n 11y ago
tachion 11y ago
There's a web app[0] that uses youtube-dl to provide non-cli functionality. Does anyone knows if there's similar tool/lib in Go? [0] http://pullz.in http://pullz.in
- mavhc 11y ago
  Nice, although it crashes when given RTMPE youtube links.
  - tachion 11y ago
    What's an RTMPE link?
    - mavhc 11y ago
      Encrypted streaming, eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsWrShXPDPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsWrShXPDPo 4 year old bug https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/343 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/343
- zwetan 11y ago
  I did a similar little prototype[0] long time ago, learned couple of interesting things from it, then moved to other protos [0] http://www.burrrn.com/ http://www.burrrn.com/
mtrn 11y ago
youtube-dl is great. It belongs to a class of software, that could not exists without a place like github (or any platform, that makes it easy to contribute). Many developers (here: 403) sharing the burden of keeping the scrapers up-to-date, which would be a dull and mind-numbing task for a single person or small group of people. Other wonderful projects in this category would be homebrew[1], wiki*, OSM, ...
mundanevoice 11y ago
This is a great project. I have been using it for more than 4 years and it has never disappointed me ever. It picks up from the interrupted download, can convert in any format you prefer and get only audio out if you will. Great work guys! Thanks for creating such an awesome piece of software.
- rg3 11y ago
  Thanks for your kind words on behalf of the current team.[1] [1] http://rg3.name/201408141628.html http://rg3.name/201408141628.html
agumonkey 11y ago
The work-horse. If the author/maintainers are here, thanks a lot. With an old laptop I need mpv/mplayer to be able to play videos without overheating. youtube-dl is my youtube backend, one of the most used commands on my terminal.
draugadrotten 11y ago
> It's a bit worrying how many people run to defend corporation profits by default. Surely you are keen to make a profit yourself with your unicorn startup idea, dear unique snowflake.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dang 11y ago
  This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all. We detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453077 and marked it off-topic.
interfixus 11y ago
I have a sort of atavistic thing against streaming. I download things, and then I watch. This is a really nifty tool, though I must say that Flashgot on Firefox does the job nicely for me, 99% of the time.
pieter_mj 11y ago
previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 I used this (on windows) to easily convert/resize videos i had saved earlier using a file:/// url, but this possibility has been removed since a few months because of the obvious security hole (in a linux context)
aryamaan 11y ago
Not exactly related to this but I remember someone wrote a script which lets you download any song (by name, artist or some phrase from the song). It uses youtube api to search the song and then download it using youtube-dl.
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  Look in this very thread, it does almost what you want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453377
GizaDog 11y ago
Great stuff! I wish I can program stuff like this.
FiloSottile 11y ago
Nostalgia time. Even though I'm not actively involved anymore, youtube-dl has been the first OSS project I seriously contributed to, and strangers still thank me at conferences for it. I owe a lot to the maintainers (hey, phihag!) for tolerating and trusting a much younger version of me :) I still remember the emotion of getting this merged: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/pull/342 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/pull/342 It's also one of the most impressive community efforts I've seen, with just about anyone contributing support for new sites and fixing broken ones: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/graphs/contributors (notice how the GH interface is limited to 100 contributors, and #100 still has 3 commits in the tree)
- Kristine1975 11y ago
  Thank you for your work on youtube-dl!
ontouchstart 11y ago
I have a docker image to run it on OSX, haven't tested on Windows yet. https://hub.docker.com/r/ontouchstart/docker-youtube-dl/ https://hub.docker.com/r/ontouchstart/docker-youtube-dl/
- robinson-wall 11y ago
  It's usable natively on OSX, but Docker isn't. Surely running youtube-dl inside a docker container inside a virtualbox VM created by boot2docker isn't easier?
- bas 11y ago
  brew install youtube-dl
noir_lord 11y ago
youtube-dl -f 141 <link> Gives you decent quality audio file from pretty much any video, you can even feed it a playlist.
ryuuchin 11y ago
Another great thing about youtube-dl is its integration in mpv[1]. On Windows as long as you have both mpv.exe[2] and youtube-dl.exe in the same folder you can use it to play pretty much whatever youtube-dl supports. This should also work on *nix/Mac as well just check your distro's repo's or wherever you look for stuff like that on Mac (can you tell I've not used Mac stuff ever). I rather like using it for things like twitch streams since I can bypass having to use Flash and get a higher quality renderer in the process (with things like high quality scaling[3] and debanding[4]). And it goes without saying that it's nice for youtube stuff as well because of the aforementioned benefits. Basically it makes stuff look even better than if you watched it the browser, and I like that. [1] https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/ [2] https://mpv.srsfckn.biz/ https://mpv.srsfckn.biz/ (official Windows builds) [3] https://mpv.io/manual/master/#video-output-drivers-opengl https://mpv.io/manual/master/#video-output-drivers-opengl mpv supports ewa_lanczossharp (aka jinc) for scaling among others [4] Also a huge fan of the debanding which can be left on all the time
sdk77 11y ago
I'm in China and streaming youtube videos is mostly out of the question, due to the very unpredictable and usually too slow nature of connectivity (I gave up on VPN long time ago and use a number of strategically placed cheap virtual servers). Over the years, youtube-dl has been a godsend. I ssh into one of my servers, download the video and then rsync it over to my laptop. Most of the time I don't really need to have the video stored locally - if I was at home I'd just stream it again - but for some niche applications like mine it's next to nothing. The buffering built in to youtube itself too often just stops or throws me into 'an error has occurred'.
- evanreichard 11y ago
  Why not use an SSH tunnel as a SOCKS proxy? Would save you a few steps there.
  - dylz 11y ago
    Standard ssh tunnels get torn down or throttled or reset.
goldenrules 11y ago
i love youtube-dl. i've been interested in doing the same with soundcloud, but i have no idea how to go about learning how their streaming works. any advice for where to start?
- insin 11y ago
  Some useful hints here: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/soundcloud.py https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/ext...
- lozf 11y ago
  Soundcloud is on the list of supported sites for youtube-dl and has worked perfectly for quite a while (unless Soundcloud broke something in the last few months).
  - ngokevin 11y ago
    I first added Soundcloud support to youtube-dl when I was in college. Good times!
- goldenrules 11y ago
  thanks! i must have glossed over that when i first discovered youtube-dl. like countless others before, i found out how to do the one thing i needed to and ignored the rest of the tool's utility.
- looknee 11y ago
  I actually have a small node program that downloads your entire Favorites collection by just providing your username as a command line argument if you or anyone's interested
  - nathanasmith 11y ago
    Um, I'd be interested!
nxzero 11y ago
YouTube needs a "download" button; love this code, it works like magic, but for the average user the real answer is that YouTube needs a way to download a video; otherwise, YouTube is just enabling all the 3rd party sites that exploit YouTube making it easy to "hack" a way to download the files, but hard for the average user who ends up getting malware to download the video.
adrianbd 11y ago
I often use mps-youtube, which I believe is based on youtube-dl and works great to listen to music off youtube from the terminal. https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
rooneyyyy 11y ago
I use 4K Video Downloader. It has lot of options, download subtitles along with the video, download playlists, 3D Videos, 4K Videos and lot of other options and supports lot of websites apart from YouTube. It supports Windows, Linux and Mac, very user friendly, perfect for parents who use PC to download videos. They even have a telegram bot to download audio from YouTube, SoundCloud, Vevo, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook etc. https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-videodownloader https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-videodownloader Telegram Bot : https://telegram.me/FourKDownloadBot https://telegram.me/FourKDownloadBot
akagetsu01 11y ago
I made something like that over Christmas..it's pretty shit but it works to download youtube videos as mp3 :-/ http://akagetsu.com/youtube/ http://akagetsu.com/youtube/
- 946789987649 11y ago
  Is this open source by any chance?
rasz_pl 11y ago
The best use case for youtube-dl is extracting direct mp4 link and piping it to mplayer youtube-dl -g url | mplayer
- pritambaral 11y ago
  mpv (which calls itself a better mplayer) and vlc both use youtube-dl internally if given a youtube url to play.
milge 11y ago
Recently, I wrote a chrome plugin that saves information of all of the songs I listen to on youtube to amazon since youtube's history API is shit. Theoretically, I could write a nightly job that runs YouTube-dl to turn all of those videos into MP3s. Taking it even further, I could run a nightly SyncMe job on my phone to copy the MP3s locally. A setup like this would be good for people with limited phone bandwidth. Imagine not having to search out MP3s anymore. Is it still considered pirating if a robot does it?
- phonyphonecall 11y ago
  Unfortunately, the robot only does what you tell it to do.
- Kenji 11y ago
  Yeah but how are they gonna detect it. Streaming a video is pretty much indistinguishable from downloading since that's what you actually do. If there's no claimant, there's no judge. I'd say things like that are de facto legal since it cannot be enforced.
givan 11y ago
I use vlctube https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube to not only download youtube videos but to also use vlc as default player, there is a huge performance boost, I no longer hear my cpu fan when playing a youtube video.
plug 11y ago
What a funny coincidence - I just discovered and used this a few hours ago. I wanted to rip some YT audio from (mostly) old records that I have that are not on Spotify etc. I looked at some browser plugins but I wasn't really impressed. This, on the other hand, was a great discovery. Really configurable and well documented. Assuming you have `ffmpeg` installed just run: `youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 $URL` and you're done! I expect my phone will be packed of bizarre prog/jazz before the end of the weekend :D
- rg3 11y ago
  If your phone supports OGG and you're downloading from YouTube, you can download format 171 (-f 171) and change the container to OGG with ffmpeg. That way you won't lose any quality.
alvern 11y ago
So excited to try this out tonight
Jarwin 11y ago
Not just YouTube, over 200 websites including daily motion, vimeo and, well were all adults here so I'm just gonna say it,pornhub. Supports authentication. And you can download with any format using -f flag. Also I'm not sure about that, but I thing you can use apt-get to download it as well.
k4rtik 11y ago
User for >4 years. Absolutely love the nifty little tool. But I hated opening up a terminal each time I wanted to initiate a download. For PopClip[1] users on Mac, I made a little YouTube-dl extension[2] which lets you initiate the download just by selecting the video URL (best when done from browser's address bar) and clicking a button. Been using it as my primary ytdl client for past 5 months now. [1]: https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ [2]: https://github.com/k4rtik/popclip-ytdl https://github.com/k4rtik/popclip-ytdl
- noobie 11y ago
  This is exactly why I love FOSS. The main functionality is there and every user can customize it to best suit his needs.
justinwr 11y ago
Damnit! I hate it when people advertise my favorite software.
MiguelVieira 11y ago
Honest question: why would you want to download a video from YouTube? The main use case I can think of is you want to watch videos offline on a mobile device but don't want to pay for a YouTube Red subscription.
- kevincox 11y ago
  Mostly offline use. It's nice to be able to include them in a presentation. Rarely archiving is useful, especially if you think a video might get taken down. Also sometimes you want to grab a clip, for example if you are including it in a larger video. I don't do it very often (except for mobile watching without burning quite as much battery) but I see a number of use cases.
- tombert 11y ago
  Well, not wanting to pay for a Youtube Red subscription is one possibility, another is that you want to access Youtube using only open source software, and another is to bypass ads. I actually do pay for Youtube Red, but I like to download my Youtube videos because a) my internet connection is a bit spotty, and b) I like to keep as much as I can open source.
- zhte415 11y ago
  offlberty.com Sometimes one may be in area of good connectivity, but often not. This is commonplace in countries with limited internet access.
- ufo 11y ago
  I have shitty internet and there are many times of the day when its hard for me to watch videos without them always buffering. youtube-dl lets me download the videos on the background so I can watch them later at a decent resolution and without all the buffering. youtube-dl is also helpful for other video serivces. For example, twitch.tv doesn't have as good of a CDN on my country as youtube does so youtube-dl is sometimes the only way for me to watch a twitch.tv VOD at decent quality (even in those days when I can watch youtube videos just fine).
- mrgoldenbrown 11y ago
amelius 11y ago
It would be nice if there was a "shadow" version of youtube on bittorrent. So instead of using youtube-dl, you could just pull the file from bittorrent. Besides this being faster in most cases, it would also mean that a big part of our cultural heritage is no longer locked inside google's silo.
CoelacanthsKill 11y ago
I've been using this for years to rip ~256k mp3's off youtube.
jisagigi 11y ago
Any thoughts on livestreamer vs Youtube-dl
techaddict009 11y ago
Isn't it illegal to download youtube videos?
- Nadya 11y ago
  Yes and No and may depend on where you live. Germany has a law that permits downloading for personal use. AFAIK in Germany that would trump YouTube's Terms of Service. ToS are legally binding, for the most part [0]. Though there may be parts that aren't enforceable or wouldn't hold up in the court of law. YouTube Terms of Service [1] doesn't permit "creating a copy". In practice this is never enforced when the video is used under Fair Use. Otherwise you'd never see any Youtubers reviewing other Youtube videos. While it is against the Terms of Service, I'm not sure if it would actually hold up in court. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service [1] https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms >Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content.
yasoob 11y ago
This is a simple GUI which I made for this script: github.com/yasoob/youtube-dl-gui. I hope you guys would like it :) All bug reports are welcome.
rb2k_ 11y ago
Huge props to the team working on this. I once maintained something similar in Ruby (https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb), and the amount of changes necessary just to keep a hand full of plugins up-to-date is crazy.
bradlys 11y ago
If you want a button built into youtube's webpages in Chrome this will do too. I believe there are other projects that do similar things but many aim at doing much more (mine is solely for the little download button which offers all the video/audio formats that youtube-dl does). https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-panda https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-panda
sig_chld_mike 11y ago
what idiots. there isn't one complete example of how to use the project with a url from Youtube. Instead we have to decrypt what the hell the documentation means.
- clarry 11y ago
  youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...] Any examples would be just noise.
SBartels 11y ago
I really don't like how others profit from the work of the youtube-dl developers. The developers should build their own client-facing websites and apps.
Walkman 11y ago
Here is a script I use to download a lot of videos in a queue with it: https://github.com/kissgyorgy/interactive-youtube-dl https://github.com/kissgyorgy/interactive-youtube-dl
joshstrange 11y ago
I've used this tool a ton of times and it is a standard install on my multimedia fetching VM. I really want to take the time to allow for a Sonarr[0]-for-youtube (and other supported sites) app that uses this on the backend. For example I love CGPGrey but don't want to constantly be downloading new videos (But I do want to watch them through my Plex setup). Some channels have convenient playlists I can download (and keep downloading) but I normally want to change the naming to a convention I specificy. [0] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/
lochlainn 11y ago
Nothing but positive experiences with youtube-dl, invaluable piece of software IMO. For people interested in tools like this, or for people who want to just watch videos without downloading, I would also recommend Livestreamer. I use it to watch Crunchyroll streams, and I avoid all the strange issues that come up with their terrible player. No more skipping to random sections of the episode. https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer
jaimehrubiks 11y ago
I built a gui/music downloader using this last year. Called musicBoo in case you want to check it out. Its multiplatform, having problems in deployment though (in java swing)
maremp 11y ago
Why is this so popular last 24h? I am using it for about a year and never saw this much hype. Is there any new feature or is it just that someone rediscovered it and it went viral?
fordarnold 11y ago
Nice simple tool
hatsunearu 11y ago
fun fact: mpv couples youtube-dl to itself and can view youtube videos simply from the command line. example: mpv "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU" (you need quotes because most shells will try to glob match)
pknerd 11y ago
Works like charm. Only if laymen can be convinced that CLI is far easier than GUI.
MrBra 11y ago
Time to revive an old debate: is downloading video or audio from YouTube for personal use illegal?
ismyrnow 11y ago
There's an app called Free Download Manager which has this feature. I suspect it may be using youtube-dl under the hood, since the functionality looks similar (with a GUI, of course). The app allows you to copy/paste youtube urls and it parses the page for available downloads (audio and video). I use it regularly for putting technical talks onto my phone to watch or listen to on my commute. The app is very easy to use, and one of the few I would recommend to a non-technical person for the features it has. I know the name makes it sound like spyware, but it's the most lightweight tool I've found for both this and the occasional torrent. http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/

989 points by h43k3r 11y ago

Kristine1975 11y ago

I've been using it for years now and it's great. Not only for Youtube videos, but also for a lot of other video hosters, up to and including TV stations such as the German ZDF or the French Arte. To fully use its features you should install ffmpeg though. Youtube-dl will automatically use it if it's in the PATH, and then can download Youtube videos with higher frame rates and resolutions (they store video and audio in separate files, and ffmpeg is used to mux both together). ffmpeg is also required to download from some streaming video hosters. For me it's essentially: youtube-dl -F '<url>' to get the list of available video and audio formats, followed by youtube-dl -f <video format>+<audio format> '<url>' and then wait for the download to complete. And youtube-dl -U to self-update youtube-dl (because it gets updated just about every day).

deleted 11y ago
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awqrre 11y ago
I like this command to extract audio from youtube videos: youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <url>
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y ago
  Or you could use -x, which would only download the audio (because there's seperate audio and video streams on youtube).
  - awqrre 11y ago
    yes -x is the same as --extract-audio, but I use an alias in my bashrc like this (if you don't use --audio-format mp3, you might not get mp3 (not necessarily a bad thing)): alias youtubemp3='youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3'
- melicerte 11y ago
  That's my main use of youtube-dl for years now. I'm extracting audio from old french movies available on youtube, work a small sound extract with audacity and then post the result on soudcloud[1]. [1] A bit of self-promotion here, if you are interested this is my soundcloud playlist https://soundcloud.com/melicerte/sets/extraits-de-vieux-films https://soundcloud.com/melicerte/sets/extraits-de-vieux-film...
  - wingerlang 11y ago
    Why?
    - luxpir 11y ago
      Why not!
      - wingerlang 11y ago
        I'm not against it or anything, I'm just wondering if it is a personal interest or if there is some niche usage I am unaware of.
  - x0 11y ago
    That is a really cool playlist.
- rg3 11y ago
  If your music player supports OGG, you can also use youtube-dl -f FORMAT VIDEO_URL and give a numeric format that corresponds to a DASH webm audio-only stream, with vorbis audio (e.g. format 171 these days). The container is webm but it can be trivially changed to OGG with ffmpeg, which you can call via --exec automatically. Edit: I mentioned that because you don't lose any quality reencoding.
- otterpro 11y ago
  I like to keep it in original audio format (usually AAC) instead of mp3, because with mp3 conversion, there is also some loss of quality due to re-compression.
reacweb 11y ago
$ youtube-dl -U It looks like you installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball. Please use that to update. TIL: https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html
ubercow 11y ago
you can also do youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio '<url>' to skip a step, since 90% of the time that's what I want anyways.
- masklinn 11y ago
  That's been the default since April 2015,so `youtube-dl url...` is sufficient to get either the best single-file video (if no ffmpeg installed or non-youtube video) or to get both the best video and the best audio remuxed.
pilif 11y ago
-f also supports some symbolic names, which is very handy because it allows you to easily get the best possible quality without having to check the formats every time: -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]' this is what I'm using in my case (on youtube). Posting this here, because it's not obvious from the docs that this works.
- masklinn 11y ago
  FWIW > Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as default format selection […] If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to best and results in downloading the best available quality served as a single file. best is also needed for videos that don't come from YouTube because they don't provide the audio and video in two different files.
  - pilif 11y ago
    bestvideo+bestaudio has been flip-flopping ver time and releases between mp4 and webm though. As I'm mostly using this for consumption on an iPad, I prefer mp4, so I'm happy to have found a way to get the best possible mp4 version without having to go format hunting.
- dstryr 11y ago
  I'm pretty sure the '-f best' setting is the default for updated versions of ytdl, so no real need for that.
  - Kristine1975 11y ago
    Unless you always want to download the best mp4, not webm (or vice versa).
oxplot 11y ago
> Not only for Youtube videos, but also for a lot of other video hosters Oh ye, the list's pretty comprehensive actually [1]. [1]: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext...

personjerry 11y ago

I feel like "ultimate" in the title is misleading.

deleted 11y ago
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danso 11y ago

Mostly OT: A friend of mine posted this article from his local newspaper as an example of how slow news is in his town: http://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/what-is-a-gif/article_c1d84944-e92a-11e5-a095-eb219cc6cd71.html http://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/what-is-a-gif/... > What is a GIF? > OTTUMWA — Chances are if you have been on the Internet lately, you have encountered a GIF...In honor of National Teen Tech Week, the Ottumwa Public Library offered a session on GIF making for local teens Saturday afternoon. OK, not a traditional article topic for a newspaper, but the library described seems to be very much on the ball, teaching teens how to use youtube-dl to download movies: > He walked each of the teens through the steps required for making GIFs by using movie trailers found on YouTube. He then had the kids copy the web address and use the program youtube-dl to download the video. OPL also provided flash drives for each person so they could access the program at home.

Kristine1975 11y ago
Don't knock gif, it's still used a lot on image boards[1] and most likely Facebook etc, too. Knowing how to make them can be quite useful for today's teens. [1] E.g. 4chan, which even has its own boards just for animated gifs: /gif/ (NSFW) and /wsg/ (SFW)
- 746F7475 11y ago
  But most content on /wsg/ is webm these days
- kragniz 11y ago
  These days it's all about the webms, though. Luckily youtube-dl is even more useful for that.
  - raihansaputra 11y ago
    but manually downloading each image/webm in a thread is not fun. i resort to use httrack and it works wonderfully.
daveloyall 11y ago

jtokoph 11y ago

Some of the things that make this the 'ultimate': - Supports hundreds of services, not just youtube [0] - Allows you to extract audio in multiple formats - Download entire playlists (and general batch support) - Configure video/audio quality - Extract/build metadata - Cross platform [0] https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html

zavi 11y ago
- Illegal
- gayprogrammer 11y ago
  How is this illegal?
- vbit 11y ago
  Not illegal perhaps but violates the TOS
  - zwetan 11y ago
    how enforceable is the TOS ? once something is published on the internet then it is assumed it can be viewed / copied / downloaded / etc. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping , the legal issues part.
    - vbit 11y ago
      Copyright is different and enforceable - see what RIAA did to some downloaders.
  - izacus 11y ago
    Unless your legislation explicitly grants you that right in a way that cannot be overriden by ToS.
- reacweb 11y ago

diegorbaquero 11y ago

I used this years ago to create a Youtube2MP3 site. This tool is great. Nice to see that it's still alive and maintained

visarga 11y ago
Second this. I use it to make mp3 playlists. I don't bother too much with mp3's nowadays, but there is a second good reason to download: it's because YouTube bookmarked videos might disappear suddenly. If you want to make sure they remain accessible, you have to download them.

leni536 11y ago

Note that mpv integrates well with youtube-dl. With an "open with" like addon it's relly handy especially on sites that are still stuck on flash.

bfung 11y ago

If you use mac, it's available on homebrew. even easier.

extrapolar 11y ago

Note that it is against YouTube's ToS to download videos: https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms "You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content."

deleted 11y ago
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jmnicolas 11y ago
So what do they propose for someone that has a slow internet connection and can't watch streaming videos ? I have a NUC server at my parents house (they have a fast connection) where I connect remotely and make all my downloads. When I visit them I bring an external HD with me.
Kristine1975 11y ago
So if I never agreed to those terms, I'm in the clear?
- Nadya 11y ago
  You agree to the terms by using the Service - not when making an account. I think something could be said about how an agreement of that manner is not legally binding so you can ignore it, but IANAL. Just a faint memory something from the legality of TOS and maybe I'm not remembering it right. I place my confidence at 85% for "not legally enforceable". It has to be brought to your attention and usually that step is when creating an account. I'm also not sure if "please do not use the Service" is equivalent to "you may not use the Service". It's a request, not a demand. But I'm not sure if that sort of pedantic attitude would slide in court. Regardless - Google/YouTube aren't enforcing this so I don't think it matters from a legal standpoint - just a moral one. >By using or visiting the YouTube website or any YouTube products, software, data feeds, and services provided to you on, from, or through the YouTube website (collectively the "Service") you signify your agreement to (1) these terms and conditions (the "Terms of Service"), (2) Google's Privacy Policy, found at http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy http://www.youtube.com/t/privacy and incorporated herein by reference, and (3) YouTube's Community Guidelines, found at http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines http://www.youtube.com/t/community_guidelines and also incorporated herein by reference. If you do not agree to any of these terms, the Google Privacy Policy, or the Community Guidelines, please do not use the Service.

guycook 11y ago

The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard drive", "download youtube videos" et al). The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just because they wanted to save a video is ridiculous.

baldfat 11y ago
I treat youtube-dl like Fight Club. I am glad it isn't on the top of searches since I am afraid sites would start trying to stop it from working harder.
- dexterdog 11y ago
  They already do. That's why it updates pretty much every time I do a homebrew update.
  - baldfat 11y ago
    I should have said. They would try harder.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
- haddr 11y ago
  I hope you haven't voted this article then. Let's keep it secret ;)
- samstave 11y ago
  Exactly! SHHH - dont talk about ytdl... obv if the masses start talking about things like this, then sites like YT will go on the attack. WE DO NOT WANT THIS.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  I don't know what parent is talking about, this script it's already very popular. I found it years ago and it wasn't difficult to find on google. Something worth mentioning is that the script works with dozens and dozens of video sites (or just sites with regular video content). Almost any video you throw at it gets downloaded. When something breaks it's usually fixed within days. It's a great piece of work.

joeyspn 11y ago

Download mp3 with the maximum possible quality. $ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" <URL>

mrspeaker 11y ago
Also, a lot of times I'll quickly grab videos from my youtube subs to listen to while I jog: if it's a video then the screen would stay on, so I just grab the audio with `youtube-dl -f 140 <URL>.` This downloads just an m4a that works on my iPhone. It's not ALWAYS format 140 (-F to see them all) but usually.

corradio 11y ago

I actually made a small script to download offline youtube videos using youtube-dl. https://github.com/corradio/watchlater https://github.com/corradio/watchlater https://oliviercorradi.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/3/ https://oliviercorradi.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/3/

em3rgent0rdr 11y ago

Initial commit is from 2008. I think title should be updated to reflect the initial year, since this is not a new project. I've been personally using this for many years.

rg3 11y ago
Actually, the project started as far back as 2006 and moved to git in 2008, hence the first commit having that date. I don't remember the exact day I started the project, but on freshcode (formerly freshmeat), the first listed version is 2006.08.08.
- em3rgent0rdr 11y ago
  thank you. I was careful to word my sentence to not imply that the project was necessarily started in 2008.

lottin 11y ago

The only thing that irritates me about youtube-dl is that by default it will try download audio and video tracks separately and then remux them on your computer. While it's a cool feature, I don't think this is what most people want 99% of the time.

brigade 11y ago
Most of the time I've seen this come up in non-technical circles, the person wanted an MP3 to put in their library.
pja 11y ago
That’s because the best quality streams are delivered that way by Google so if you want the higher quality video+audio you have to download them separately and remux them locally.
asddubs 11y ago
Don't know why this is being downvoted. VLC can play .part files of many formats, but not if they're seperate streams. I wish there was a way to just download the highest format that will download only one file.
- clarry 11y ago
  -f best It's in the documentation.
  - asddubs 11y ago
    no, that's the highest format, not the highest format that will download in one file, as opposed to two which have to be merged, meaning playing .part files is impossible
    - clarry 11y ago
      Are you saying the documentation is wrong? And not once but twice: You can also use special names to select particular edge case format: * best: Select best quality format represented by single file with video and audio And again: > Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as default format selection (see #5447, #5456). If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to best and results in downloading the best available quality served as a single file

aguynamedben 11y ago

Been using it for a while. Great for hacks, downloading 360 VR videos, downloading all videos for a channel. Was happy to see it here, it's nothing new, just a great tool, great job of surfacing it HN!

konart 11y ago

I'm amazed many people do not know about it, considering it is installed via brew together with mpv, lol.

jayadeeptp 11y ago

Isn't it against the ToS of Youtube to download videos?

Crespyl 11y ago
Technically, yes, but what do you think is happening when you watch a video from their site?

SG- 11y ago

Here's something i've added to my .bashrc that lets me type in simply 'play <some song name>' using youtube-dl and mplayer (I forget where I found this gem, and sorry for weird formatting, won): function play { youtube-dl --default-search=ytsearch: \ --youtube-skip-dash-manifest \ --output="${TMPDIR:-/tmp/}%(title)-s%(id)s.%(ext)s" \ --restrict-filenames \ --format="bestaudio[ext!=webm]" \ --exec=mplayer -vvv "$*" } play rick astley never gonna give you up

tombrossman 11y ago
One very minor annoyance I had was using it with BBC iPlayer. It works, but downloads the video as many dozens of tiny parts to reassemble. Since I use ~/Desktop as my default downloads folder, I created this to keep my desktop uncluttered while it runs: ytdl() { mkdir /tmp/ytdl && cd /tmp/ytdl for item in "$@" ; do youtube-dl "$@" ; done ; mv /tmp/ytdl/* ~/Desktop/ rm -rf /tmp/ytdl exit } Now I can Ctrl + Alt + T a new Terminal window, type ytdl http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/.. http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/... (can use multiple links) then minimise the window and move on to other things.
- porsupah 11y ago
  Wouldn't get_iplayer be simpler? http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html
- ekimekim 11y ago
  Have you considered opening an issue? Using the current directory as a temp directory seems like something that should be fixed, or at least made configurable.
Yenrabbit 11y ago
This is brilliant! Thank you :) although I renamed it to yplay, since play is already used on my system.
Cyph0n 11y ago

tachion 11y ago

There's a web app[0] that uses youtube-dl to provide non-cli functionality. Does anyone knows if there's similar tool/lib in Go? [0] http://pullz.in http://pullz.in

mavhc 11y ago
Nice, although it crashes when given RTMPE youtube links.
- tachion 11y ago
  What's an RTMPE link?
  - mavhc 11y ago
    Encrypted streaming, eg, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsWrShXPDPo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsWrShXPDPo 4 year old bug https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/343 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/343
zwetan 11y ago
I did a similar little prototype[0] long time ago, learned couple of interesting things from it, then moved to other protos [0] http://www.burrrn.com/ http://www.burrrn.com/

mtrn 11y ago

youtube-dl is great. It belongs to a class of software, that could not exists without a place like github (or any platform, that makes it easy to contribute). Many developers (here: 403) sharing the burden of keeping the scrapers up-to-date, which would be a dull and mind-numbing task for a single person or small group of people. Other wonderful projects in this category would be homebrew[1], wiki*, OSM, ...

mundanevoice 11y ago

This is a great project. I have been using it for more than 4 years and it has never disappointed me ever. It picks up from the interrupted download, can convert in any format you prefer and get only audio out if you will. Great work guys! Thanks for creating such an awesome piece of software.

rg3 11y ago
Thanks for your kind words on behalf of the current team.[1] [1] http://rg3.name/201408141628.html http://rg3.name/201408141628.html

agumonkey 11y ago

The work-horse. If the author/maintainers are here, thanks a lot. With an old laptop I need mpv/mplayer to be able to play videos without overheating. youtube-dl is my youtube backend, one of the most used commands on my terminal.

draugadrotten 11y ago

> It's a bit worrying how many people run to defend corporation profits by default. Surely you are keen to make a profit yourself with your unicorn startup idea, dear unique snowflake.

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dang 11y ago
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively or not at all. We detached it from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453077 and marked it off-topic.

interfixus 11y ago

I have a sort of atavistic thing against streaming. I download things, and then I watch. This is a really nifty tool, though I must say that Flashgot on Firefox does the job nicely for me, 99% of the time.

pieter_mj 11y ago

previous discussion : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 I used this (on windows) to easily convert/resize videos i had saved earlier using a file:/// url, but this possibility has been removed since a few months because of the obvious security hole (in a linux context)

aryamaan 11y ago

Not exactly related to this but I remember someone wrote a script which lets you download any song (by name, artist or some phrase from the song). It uses youtube api to search the song and then download it using youtube-dl.

Kristine1975 11y ago
Look in this very thread, it does almost what you want: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453377 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453377

GizaDog 11y ago

Great stuff! I wish I can program stuff like this.

FiloSottile 11y ago

Nostalgia time. Even though I'm not actively involved anymore, youtube-dl has been the first OSS project I seriously contributed to, and strangers still thank me at conferences for it. I owe a lot to the maintainers (hey, phihag!) for tolerating and trusting a much younger version of me :) I still remember the emotion of getting this merged: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/pull/342 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/pull/342 It's also one of the most impressive community efforts I've seen, with just about anyone contributing support for new sites and fixing broken ones: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/graphs/contributors https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/graphs/contributors (notice how the GH interface is limited to 100 contributors, and #100 still has 3 commits in the tree)

Kristine1975 11y ago
Thank you for your work on youtube-dl!

ontouchstart 11y ago

I have a docker image to run it on OSX, haven't tested on Windows yet. https://hub.docker.com/r/ontouchstart/docker-youtube-dl/ https://hub.docker.com/r/ontouchstart/docker-youtube-dl/

robinson-wall 11y ago
It's usable natively on OSX, but Docker isn't. Surely running youtube-dl inside a docker container inside a virtualbox VM created by boot2docker isn't easier?
bas 11y ago
brew install youtube-dl

noir_lord 11y ago

youtube-dl -f 141 <link> Gives you decent quality audio file from pretty much any video, you can even feed it a playlist.

ryuuchin 11y ago

Another great thing about youtube-dl is its integration in mpv[1]. On Windows as long as you have both mpv.exe[2] and youtube-dl.exe in the same folder you can use it to play pretty much whatever youtube-dl supports. This should also work on *nix/Mac as well just check your distro's repo's or wherever you look for stuff like that on Mac (can you tell I've not used Mac stuff ever). I rather like using it for things like twitch streams since I can bypass having to use Flash and get a higher quality renderer in the process (with things like high quality scaling[3] and debanding[4]). And it goes without saying that it's nice for youtube stuff as well because of the aforementioned benefits. Basically it makes stuff look even better than if you watched it the browser, and I like that. [1] https://mpv.io/ https://mpv.io/ [2] https://mpv.srsfckn.biz/ https://mpv.srsfckn.biz/ (official Windows builds) [3] https://mpv.io/manual/master/#video-output-drivers-opengl https://mpv.io/manual/master/#video-output-drivers-opengl mpv supports ewa_lanczossharp (aka jinc) for scaling among others [4] Also a huge fan of the debanding which can be left on all the time

sdk77 11y ago

I'm in China and streaming youtube videos is mostly out of the question, due to the very unpredictable and usually too slow nature of connectivity (I gave up on VPN long time ago and use a number of strategically placed cheap virtual servers). Over the years, youtube-dl has been a godsend. I ssh into one of my servers, download the video and then rsync it over to my laptop. Most of the time I don't really need to have the video stored locally - if I was at home I'd just stream it again - but for some niche applications like mine it's next to nothing. The buffering built in to youtube itself too often just stops or throws me into 'an error has occurred'.

evanreichard 11y ago
Why not use an SSH tunnel as a SOCKS proxy? Would save you a few steps there.
- dylz 11y ago
  Standard ssh tunnels get torn down or throttled or reset.

goldenrules 11y ago

i love youtube-dl. i've been interested in doing the same with soundcloud, but i have no idea how to go about learning how their streaming works. any advice for where to start?

insin 11y ago
Some useful hints here: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/soundcloud.py https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/ext...
lozf 11y ago
Soundcloud is on the list of supported sites for youtube-dl and has worked perfectly for quite a while (unless Soundcloud broke something in the last few months).
- ngokevin 11y ago
  I first added Soundcloud support to youtube-dl when I was in college. Good times!
goldenrules 11y ago
thanks! i must have glossed over that when i first discovered youtube-dl. like countless others before, i found out how to do the one thing i needed to and ignored the rest of the tool's utility.
looknee 11y ago
I actually have a small node program that downloads your entire Favorites collection by just providing your username as a command line argument if you or anyone's interested
- nathanasmith 11y ago
  Um, I'd be interested!

nxzero 11y ago

YouTube needs a "download" button; love this code, it works like magic, but for the average user the real answer is that YouTube needs a way to download a video; otherwise, YouTube is just enabling all the 3rd party sites that exploit YouTube making it easy to "hack" a way to download the files, but hard for the average user who ends up getting malware to download the video.

adrianbd 11y ago

I often use mps-youtube, which I believe is based on youtube-dl and works great to listen to music off youtube from the terminal. https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube

rooneyyyy 11y ago

I use 4K Video Downloader. It has lot of options, download subtitles along with the video, download playlists, 3D Videos, 4K Videos and lot of other options and supports lot of websites apart from YouTube. It supports Windows, Linux and Mac, very user friendly, perfect for parents who use PC to download videos. They even have a telegram bot to download audio from YouTube, SoundCloud, Vevo, Vimeo, Dailymotion, Facebook etc. https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-videodownloader https://www.4kdownload.com/products/product-videodownloader Telegram Bot : https://telegram.me/FourKDownloadBot https://telegram.me/FourKDownloadBot

akagetsu01 11y ago

I made something like that over Christmas..it's pretty shit but it works to download youtube videos as mp3 :-/ http://akagetsu.com/youtube/ http://akagetsu.com/youtube/

946789987649 11y ago
Is this open source by any chance?

rasz_pl 11y ago

The best use case for youtube-dl is extracting direct mp4 link and piping it to mplayer youtube-dl -g url | mplayer

pritambaral 11y ago
mpv (which calls itself a better mplayer) and vlc both use youtube-dl internally if given a youtube url to play.

milge 11y ago

Recently, I wrote a chrome plugin that saves information of all of the songs I listen to on youtube to amazon since youtube's history API is shit. Theoretically, I could write a nightly job that runs YouTube-dl to turn all of those videos into MP3s. Taking it even further, I could run a nightly SyncMe job on my phone to copy the MP3s locally. A setup like this would be good for people with limited phone bandwidth. Imagine not having to search out MP3s anymore. Is it still considered pirating if a robot does it?

phonyphonecall 11y ago
Unfortunately, the robot only does what you tell it to do.
Kenji 11y ago
Yeah but how are they gonna detect it. Streaming a video is pretty much indistinguishable from downloading since that's what you actually do. If there's no claimant, there's no judge. I'd say things like that are de facto legal since it cannot be enforced.

givan 11y ago

I use vlctube https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube to not only download youtube videos but to also use vlc as default player, there is a huge performance boost, I no longer hear my cpu fan when playing a youtube video.

plug 11y ago

What a funny coincidence - I just discovered and used this a few hours ago. I wanted to rip some YT audio from (mostly) old records that I have that are not on Spotify etc. I looked at some browser plugins but I wasn't really impressed. This, on the other hand, was a great discovery. Really configurable and well documented. Assuming you have `ffmpeg` installed just run: `youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 $URL` and you're done! I expect my phone will be packed of bizarre prog/jazz before the end of the weekend :D

rg3 11y ago
If your phone supports OGG and you're downloading from YouTube, you can download format 171 (-f 171) and change the container to OGG with ffmpeg. That way you won't lose any quality.

alvern 11y ago

So excited to try this out tonight

Jarwin 11y ago

Not just YouTube, over 200 websites including daily motion, vimeo and, well were all adults here so I'm just gonna say it,pornhub. Supports authentication. And you can download with any format using -f flag. Also I'm not sure about that, but I thing you can use apt-get to download it as well.

k4rtik 11y ago

User for >4 years. Absolutely love the nifty little tool. But I hated opening up a terminal each time I wanted to initiate a download. For PopClip[1] users on Mac, I made a little YouTube-dl extension[2] which lets you initiate the download just by selecting the video URL (best when done from browser's address bar) and clicking a button. Been using it as my primary ytdl client for past 5 months now. [1]: https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/ [2]: https://github.com/k4rtik/popclip-ytdl https://github.com/k4rtik/popclip-ytdl

noobie 11y ago
This is exactly why I love FOSS. The main functionality is there and every user can customize it to best suit his needs.

justinwr 11y ago

Damnit! I hate it when people advertise my favorite software.

MiguelVieira 11y ago

Honest question: why would you want to download a video from YouTube? The main use case I can think of is you want to watch videos offline on a mobile device but don't want to pay for a YouTube Red subscription.

kevincox 11y ago
Mostly offline use. It's nice to be able to include them in a presentation. Rarely archiving is useful, especially if you think a video might get taken down. Also sometimes you want to grab a clip, for example if you are including it in a larger video. I don't do it very often (except for mobile watching without burning quite as much battery) but I see a number of use cases.
tombert 11y ago
Well, not wanting to pay for a Youtube Red subscription is one possibility, another is that you want to access Youtube using only open source software, and another is to bypass ads. I actually do pay for Youtube Red, but I like to download my Youtube videos because a) my internet connection is a bit spotty, and b) I like to keep as much as I can open source.
zhte415 11y ago
offlberty.com Sometimes one may be in area of good connectivity, but often not. This is commonplace in countries with limited internet access.
ufo 11y ago
I have shitty internet and there are many times of the day when its hard for me to watch videos without them always buffering. youtube-dl lets me download the videos on the background so I can watch them later at a decent resolution and without all the buffering. youtube-dl is also helpful for other video serivces. For example, twitch.tv doesn't have as good of a CDN on my country as youtube does so youtube-dl is sometimes the only way for me to watch a twitch.tv VOD at decent quality (even in those days when I can watch youtube videos just fine).
mrgoldenbrown 11y ago

amelius 11y ago

It would be nice if there was a "shadow" version of youtube on bittorrent. So instead of using youtube-dl, you could just pull the file from bittorrent. Besides this being faster in most cases, it would also mean that a big part of our cultural heritage is no longer locked inside google's silo.

CoelacanthsKill 11y ago

I've been using this for years to rip ~256k mp3's off youtube.

jisagigi 11y ago

Any thoughts on livestreamer vs Youtube-dl

techaddict009 11y ago

Isn't it illegal to download youtube videos?

Nadya 11y ago
Yes and No and may depend on where you live. Germany has a law that permits downloading for personal use. AFAIK in Germany that would trump YouTube's Terms of Service. ToS are legally binding, for the most part [0]. Though there may be parts that aren't enforceable or wouldn't hold up in the court of law. YouTube Terms of Service [1] doesn't permit "creating a copy". In practice this is never enforced when the video is used under Fair Use. Otherwise you'd never see any Youtubers reviewing other Youtube videos. While it is against the Terms of Service, I'm not sure if it would actually hold up in court. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service [1] https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms >Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content. YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to the Service and the Content.

yasoob 11y ago

This is a simple GUI which I made for this script: github.com/yasoob/youtube-dl-gui. I hope you guys would like it :) All bug reports are welcome.

rb2k_ 11y ago

Huge props to the team working on this. I once maintained something similar in Ruby (https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb), and the amount of changes necessary just to keep a hand full of plugins up-to-date is crazy.

bradlys 11y ago

If you want a button built into youtube's webpages in Chrome this will do too. I believe there are other projects that do similar things but many aim at doing much more (mine is solely for the little download button which offers all the video/audio formats that youtube-dl does). https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-panda https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-panda

sig_chld_mike 11y ago

what idiots. there isn't one complete example of how to use the project with a url from Youtube. Instead we have to decrypt what the hell the documentation means.

clarry 11y ago
youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...] Any examples would be just noise.

SBartels 11y ago

I really don't like how others profit from the work of the youtube-dl developers. The developers should build their own client-facing websites and apps.

Walkman 11y ago

Here is a script I use to download a lot of videos in a queue with it: https://github.com/kissgyorgy/interactive-youtube-dl https://github.com/kissgyorgy/interactive-youtube-dl

joshstrange 11y ago

I've used this tool a ton of times and it is a standard install on my multimedia fetching VM. I really want to take the time to allow for a Sonarr[0]-for-youtube (and other supported sites) app that uses this on the backend. For example I love CGPGrey but don't want to constantly be downloading new videos (But I do want to watch them through my Plex setup). Some channels have convenient playlists I can download (and keep downloading) but I normally want to change the naming to a convention I specificy. [0] https://sonarr.tv/ https://sonarr.tv/

lochlainn 11y ago

Nothing but positive experiences with youtube-dl, invaluable piece of software IMO. For people interested in tools like this, or for people who want to just watch videos without downloading, I would also recommend Livestreamer. I use it to watch Crunchyroll streams, and I avoid all the strange issues that come up with their terrible player. No more skipping to random sections of the episode. https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer

jaimehrubiks 11y ago

I built a gui/music downloader using this last year. Called musicBoo in case you want to check it out. Its multiplatform, having problems in deployment though (in java swing)

maremp 11y ago

Why is this so popular last 24h? I am using it for about a year and never saw this much hype. Is there any new feature or is it just that someone rediscovered it and it went viral?

fordarnold 11y ago

Nice simple tool

hatsunearu 11y ago

fun fact: mpv couples youtube-dl to itself and can view youtube videos simply from the command line. example: mpv "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU" (you need quotes because most shells will try to glob match)

pknerd 11y ago

Works like charm. Only if laymen can be convinced that CLI is far easier than GUI.

MrBra 11y ago

Time to revive an old debate: is downloading video or audio from YouTube for personal use illegal?

ismyrnow 11y ago

There's an app called Free Download Manager which has this feature. I suspect it may be using youtube-dl under the hood, since the functionality looks similar (with a GUI, of course). The app allows you to copy/paste youtube urls and it parses the page for available downloads (audio and video). I use it regularly for putting technical talks onto my phone to watch or listen to on my commute. The app is very easy to use, and one of the few I would recommend to a non-technical person for the features it has. I know the name makes it sound like spyware, but it's the most lightweight tool I've found for both this and the occasional torrent. http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/ http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/