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Youtube-dl: Command-line program to download videos

581 points by axiomdata316 8y ago

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
The program works on a huge list of streaming sites, not just YouTube. I believe it started as a YouTube only thing and then grew. Edit: Found the list of supported sites. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/docs/supportedsites.md https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/docs/supported...
Firerouge 8y ago
For Mac users, this can be easily installed and updated using brew.
- protomyth 8y ago
  or macports
  - iosDrone 8y ago
    Or brew :P
- fooker 8y ago
  I found brew's version of youtube-dl to be often out of date. Haven't tried recently, this was last year.
  - computerfriend 8y ago
    It's one of my most frequently updated formulæ.
  - predakanga 8y ago
    My compromise is to install brew's version of python, then use pip to install youtube-dl
rolodato 8y ago
"From YouTube.com" is a massive understatement. youtube-dl can download from pretty much any video site, including porn sites: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ansfw https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Adding additional extractors is also trivial.
  - voltagex_ 8y ago
    Have you got an example? I couldn't work out how to do it last time, but it's easier for me to get an Australian geoblocked site going than it is to submit a bug report and wait for someone to use a proxy.
    - rapfaria 8y ago
      You can search through pull requests to see a few examples, but I wouldn't say it's that simple. Login in and authentication can be very different for each website.
    - bschwindHN 8y ago
      All their extractors can be found here: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext...
- omeid2 8y ago
  All those NSFW labels. Maybe after all internet is made for pom.
  - YaxelPerez 8y ago
    Correct me if I'm wrong but I think advances in video streaming tech were pioneered by "cam girls" (porn).
rodorgas 8y ago
When I want to download a video from a site I always think “it would be great if youtube-dl worked with this niche website, but I think it’s too specific”, then I try and it works, I’m always surprised.
- faitswulff 8y ago
  I had this moment when I decided to throw a crunchyroll url at it on a whim and it worked flawlessly.
- Ajedi32 8y ago
  It's a pretty extensive list: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext...
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Even works with twitch which I find really handy
adamnemecek 8y ago
I’m particular to jdownloader. http://jdownloader.org http://jdownloader.org Works on so many downloading services and also YouTube.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  its much bigger, size wise. Youtube-dl also works perfectly from the command line.
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  I like JDownloader, but it comes with adware and other things in its installer.
  - wp381640 8y ago
    Run it on docker, I use jlesage/jdownloader-2
    - rekado 8y ago
      How does the problem of running some untrustworthy code get better by adding even more binaries? Is the goal just to use the kernel's process isolation features that you can access with `unshare`? Or do you mean to just bypass the installation step (because that purportedly contains adware)?
StavrosK 8y ago
The most useful part of youtube-dl is that it works with mpv, so you just pass a URL on the command line and MPV just plays the video in it. I have two monitors, so I put a button on my Firefox toolbar to launch MPV with the current URL, and configured MPV to start fullscreen on the second monitor immediately and quit when done. It's made my video-watching experience on the web an order of magnitude better.
- ekianjo 8y ago
  yup. you can a quick macro in qtebrowser as well. It gets rid of ads nicely too.
  - gkya 8y ago
    I was using Qutebrowser since some months because I had some problems with how Firefox causing data loss, but I had to go back to Firefox recently because Qutebrowser is too slow and memory-consuming w/ many tabs open, even if suspended (i.e. >= 10 or 15 tabs for me). Firefox 61 now consumes way less memory and no idle CPU at all thanks to a strict Ublock Origin policy (basically no JS or >=1Mb images if you're not a snowflake; I had similar blocking in Qutebrowser too). Is this something you experience too, or maybe caused by my setup?
- milkmiruku 8y ago
  I set this up recently (the 'Play with MPV' method) after noting that viewing YouTube in the browser had a far greater CPU usage than watching the same in mpv. I've also given gtk-youtube-viewer a spin but it doesn't do "new videos of your subscriptions" (though it's command=line equivalent 'youtube-viewer -SV' does). Any recommendations out there for similar YouTube frontends? Also, at least in the UK, youtube-dl can access BBC iPlayer content without the login required on the web.
  - meribold 8y ago
    You can use a feed reader. I have Newsboat set up with a feed that shows all my YouTube subscriptions and a macro that opens the URL from the selected item in mpv.
lettergram 8y ago
Ive been watching this repo for over a while. It's very active and I highly recommend trying it out. It's a pretty nifty project with a lot or activity.
voltagex_ 8y ago
Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452765 Some good discussion there.
pwaai 8y ago
I just hit download and I can watch any movie on Premium, but i appreciate this tool as well
- dannyw 8y ago
  Those downloads get removed if the uploader deletes the video.
  - swebs 8y ago
    How does that work? Does it require giving Youtube access to your file system?
    - dannyw 8y ago
      Downloads only work within the app. Videos are DRM’d and you must connect to the internet at least once every 30 days to watch.
sevrex 8y ago
I've been using this for years and it is absolutley excellent
mxfh 8y ago
Since letting kids alone on youtube, is clusterf* of a nightmare, this is a godsend tool to archive approved channels to a local media server. This config file (with separate channel-list- and archive-files) template found here, has proven quite useful to me combined with some minimal batch job: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/858ny5/my_youtubedl_config_downloading_entire_channels/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/858ny5/my_yout...
- bitmapbrother 8y ago
  >Since letting kids alone on youtube, is clusterf* of a nightmare, Could you have caked on more hyperbole? Yes, let's just let kids search the Internet and see what they come up with.
  - salvar 8y ago
    I wouldn't call it hyperbole at all once you learn about Elsagate.
    - mxfh 8y ago
      Doesn't need to be elsagate level, stuff get's questionable to abusive (think unregulated child labor and unnessary emotional stress) really fast. It's worrysome on both producer and viewer side at pre-teen ages especially. Parenting against a hyper-engineered viewer retention (recommendation is an euphemism at this point) engine is a lost cause to begin with. Tried supervised youtube with my 3 year old for a while and it's always going places you would never expect, and not in a good way. Even for quality content, just look what wildbrain or DHX Media?, did in terms of ad-count, to "Yo Gabba Gabba" recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YN8bUHufPk&list=PLc7QkGFtZUZ73cexJsrEzjXkiKxv5qi_N https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YN8bUHufPk&list=PLc7QkGFtZU... I count up 20 partly animated ad overlays plus a preroll in just 20m, who is willing to monitor that as a parent? The core of the problem I have with the whole thing, is that YouTube prays on the weakest of the weakest, not even me. It's children of parents that simply can't afford daycare and video subscription services, that I worry about the most.
- 8y ago
superkuh 8y ago
I've been using this ever since youtube dropped flash support. Early this year youtube began throttling certain file formats and qualities. The way around this is to call youtube-dl so that it uses an external downloader like, --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args "-j 8 -s 8" I wrap the entire thing up in some shell script as a .bashrc function which takes a URL, touches the downloaded file (since youtube-dl saves the youtube file modified date), then opens it in vlc.
- pdkl95 8y ago
  When I tried using aria2 to work around the throttling you mentioned, I noticed that simply using aria2 at all (no parallelism with -j/-s) fixed the download rate. The primary difference was the User-Agent header; the standard youtube-dl User-Agent[1] was throttled, but "aria2/1.30.0" was full speed. The throttling also seemed to depend on which server was sending the file; a bunch of recent uploads were throttled, while an obscure video from 8 years ago with <100 views only had the usual small slow-start delay that was common with videos that probably needed to be fetched completely uncached from from a remote data center. The throttling problem seemed to go away after a few weeks, and returned again for a few hours a . Is it possible the "throttling" was actually some type of bug or configuration error in Google's network and/or data archives? [1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/utils.py#L85 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/uti...
  - predakanga 8y ago
    It's been my experience that only the split audio/video streams are throttled - it's possible that your obscure video didn't have those available for some reason, meaning that you got the unthrottled combined file. You can force this behaviour by using the "-f best" options, though that means you won't get certain resolutions (1080p) or codecs (opus). It's possible that this behaviour was designed to be pro-user; I can imagine a circumstance where a DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) client hit a patch of network congestion, dropped to a lower quality, then the network cleared up and it downloaded the rest of the video in low quality before it could switch back. Throttling the speeds to just above the bitrate of the video would solve that. Mind you, that doesn't explain the user-agent targeting described in other comments...
JohnKacz 8y ago
Gotta be careful sometimes. At least one tutorial video site I used it on (where an account was needed) I was blocked and had to open a ticket to re-enable my account by promising not to break their ToS which said something explicit about not downloading a bunch of their videos. (I was using it on whole courses and got flagged)
- swyx 8y ago
  i mean... you were breaking the TOS though. that was a risk you presumably are comfortable with.
  - JohnKacz 8y ago
    Right. That's essentially what I was trying to say.
  - jtbayly 8y ago
    I’m laughing at the thought of reading the Terms of Service. Anywhere.
    - batiudrami 8y ago
      knowing that downloading the videos/using them outside of what was expressly intended by the provider would be against the TOS is pretty intuitive though, no?
      - Dylan16807 8y ago
        I would not just assume that downloading courses I paid for is outside the intended purpose.
- jethro_tell 8y ago
  Yeah, gotta add && sleep 3600 and go to bed.
toomanybeersies 8y ago
Youtube-dl works with soundcloud as well, which is a useful feature. It can even download playlists and albums. It also has support for downloading images from Flickr, to an extent.
- JackCh 8y ago
  Youtube-dl works with nearly everything. It's incredibly versatile.
sergiotapia 8y ago
This may be my most favorite piece of software I have installed. Does what it says on the tin, nothing more nothing less. LASER-focused, I really love that about it. mpv also comes close as great software.
- fooker 8y ago
  Significantly more, actually. It can download videos from just about any website, and yes, including and especially NSFW ones.
- shmerl 8y ago
  mpv is using youtube-dl itself.
  - s3m4j 8y ago
    Which is great with twitch. Instant benefits : no chat, video decoding outside browser. On some laptops it makes a big difference.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  Going off topic, but I must be one of those weird people who prefers mplayer to mpv. When watching a video, I like not knowing how long the video is. The OSD in mpv spoils it for me. With mplayer, I can set in a config file to have OSD off by default. Couldn't figure out how to do it with mpv. I think I had a few other things in my config that isn't supported by mpv (and some where the mpv team explicitly said they won't - mpv is mplayer without the bloat, after all).
  - kqr 8y ago
    Huh, I wish I knew what you were talking about. I have used mpv for many years now, and I have no OSD while watching -- only when pausing, seeking, and otherwise interacting with it.
    - BeetleB 8y ago
etaioinshrdlu 8y ago
The elephant in the room is obviously that this is probably illegal under DMCA.
- otakucode 8y ago
  Hrmm... I'm not sure. At any point in the protocol is there a "copyright bit"? It only takes one bit, and it doesn't even have to be documented as serving that purpose. The StreamboxVCR case ended up cementing into law (because the Streambox people ran out of money and couldn't appear to answer the last appeal by RealNetworks) that disobeying one undocumented bit is all it takes to run afoul of section 1201 of the DMCA. I imagine there might be such a bit in the YouTube stream but I don't know. I'm also not sure how you could defend in court that creating the temporary copy in memory for purposes of playing a stream is given permission, but creating a more permanent one is not. Courts have held that transitory copies in memory are actual copies, and can constitute real infringement, but obviously YouTube gives implicit permission to users to the creation of that copy, and youtube-dl doesn't actually create any additional copies beside that, it just keeps it.
- olefoo 8y ago
  Which is one of the aspects of why the DMCA is such bad law and DRM in general is a complete waste of time. If you hand someone a stream of bits and a decryption key that turns it into a movie. They will figure out how to keep the decrypted movie around if they want or need to do that. So then you get into a coevolutionary arms race where content licensing organizations feel they have the right to imposes draconian restrictions on peoples personal electronics. And mandated spyware is not really ethical either.
- JackCh 8y ago
  If by "elephant in the room" you mean "something nobody gives a single shit about." Seriously, why should I care? Should File->Save Page As... be considered the "elephant in the room" when Firefox is discussed?
  - dredmorbius 8y ago
    EitR has more to do with known risks whose acknowledgement is inconvenient. It's not a matter of DGAF, but rather, ignoring in the hopes that it will go away, or the risk will fall on another. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.htm...
ryuuchin 8y ago
There's also ytdl integration in mpv[1]. The excellent open source media player. So anything you can download with ytdl you can stream in mpv. [1] https://mpv.io https://mpv.io
- jamklda 8y ago
  MPC-BE has Youtube-dl integration aswell https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/
EvanAnderson 8y ago
I feel like the first rule of youtube-dl is not to talk about youtube-dl. I keep expecting Google (and all the other sites it works on) to start taking active measures to disable it. At some point YouTube is going to require an EME module to play even "free" videos.
- userbinator 8y ago
  While I agree with you in principle (and have used a very similar setup for many years), I don't think HN is pro-DRM/IP enough to worry. At some point YouTube is going to require an EME module to play even "free" videos. ...which will be cracked within days if not hours.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    > which will be cracked within days if not hours. Netflix requires an EME module since quite some time, and I'm not aware of any successful cracks.
    - deno 8y ago
      All Netflix-exclusive shows are available up to 4K on torrent networks: https://thepiratebay.org/search/house%20of%20cards%202160p/0/99/0 https://thepiratebay.org/search/house%20of%20cards%202160p/0... https://thepiratebay.org/search/orange%20is%20the%20new%20black%202160p/0/99/0 https://thepiratebay.org/search/orange%20is%20the%20new%20bl... https://1337x.to/search/ozark+2160p/1/ https://1337x.to/search/ozark+2160p/1/ What’s left to steal? Meanwhile the majority of Netflix customers is limited to 720p video like it’s 2001. [1] [1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763
      - realusername 8y ago
        > Google Chrome up to 720p Internet Explorer up to 1080p Microsoft Edge up to 4K* Mozilla Firefox up to 720p Opera up to 720p Windows 8 app up to 1080p Windows 10 app up to 4K* (from your link). And people wonder why I still use torrents...
shibel 8y ago
I’ve actually used this one for quite a nifty Python script: Invoke a Workflow from a YouTube video on my iPhone -> Dropbox file gets appended with all the details of video -> Hazel is watching this file and triggers the Python script -> which converts the video to MP3, slaps on relevant tags and cover-art and uploads it to my iCloud Music Library [1]. So I can have an MP3 song on my iPhone minutes after I’ve watched the video on YouTube. [1] I do have Apple Music & Spotify [2], this is primarily for live/rare versions, and piano covers that I like. [2] need both for testing, “officialy” launching https://www.musicbutler.io https://www.musicbutler.io soon. /shamelessplug
- xfer 8y ago
  A lot of anime/game music is not on any streaming service; so youtube-dl is the only option.
  - Karrot_Kream 8y ago
    There are tons of anime music torrents out there, and even groups that let you xdcc download from IRC
  - shibel 8y ago
    Yep. I would rather and do pay for music. As said I use this predominantly for obscure stuff.
  - BigJono 8y ago
    It's especially bad with games because music gets updated and changed all the time. Official soundtracks often leave tracks out, take for example Civilization V which has an official soundtrack with like 30 tracks, when the game itself has more like 300. It's up to avid players of the game to compile and document the full collection. Game developers by and large don't give a shit if the musician's work is preserved. If they don't make an effort then as far as I'm concerned they're forfeiting their right to take issue with the morality of downloading their game's music.
    - TAForObvReasons 8y ago
bane 8y ago
There's a stupid easy to use gui for this as well. https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui
eurticket 8y ago
Please stop talking about this, I love how it is now!
- QasimK 8y ago
  But if people didn’t talk about this, I would have have known that I could use it to watch BBC iPlayer without going through the annoying login-wall!
  - Synaesthesia 8y ago
    Wow that’s really useful to know. It also works for YouTube vids which are blocked in your country. :-)
    - crtasm 8y ago
      It does? I used it to grab a full series of an 90s movie reviews show and some episodes were 'unavailable in your region'. Some other episodes had the different error of unavailable due to copyright claim by [various movie distributors].
      - Synaesthesia 8y ago
        It did work for me with cricket clips only available in India ..
  - crtasm 8y ago
    Very useful! Did you hear about get_iPlayer too?
    - QasimK 8y ago
      No, amazing!
palad1n 8y ago
I tried downloading a video I purchased on Youtube but what got retrieved I could not view. The DRM seems to have prevented this from working.
- caractacus 8y ago
  What was the video?
shmerl 8y ago
youtube-dl does a good job of merging DASH streams into proper media files. It can also parse various audio sites, and I think it's what mpv is using for Bandcamp for example. Try this: mpv https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-square
beebmam 8y ago
I think youtube-dl/archiver tools present some ethical problems. If you're publishing something for commercial, do you have a right to one day revoke that item you've published? I think many would say that no, you don't have that right. Fair use and all that. But if you're publishing your diary or some other personal items about your life, not for something commercial, then I think many would argue that yes, you should have that right. To have the right to make all data about you disappear. I'm pretty sure RMS explored these ethics before in some of his writings. Personally, I'm a user of youtube-dl and have written some tools based on cloud tech that helps me automate archival of all media I come across that I find valuable. But I'm not so sure it's completely ethical in all cases.
- exabrial 8y ago
  You should assume anything you let leave your own device is permanent. Anything else is a pretty big pipe dream
- JackCh 8y ago
  Do I have the right to go into peoples homes and root through their archived correspondence to find and burn lengthy personal Christmas letters I once sent them? If instead of writing a letter I made a video and sent them a link, and they decided to keep the video around, that would be no different. They would have no moral right to republish that letter/video, but I would have no moral right to take their copy from them.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  If I published my diary or something personal in a newspaper, I would not have that right. If you upload to youtube and make it public, then that's exactly what it is - public. You may have the right to pull it from Youtube one day, but that's the extent of it.
rocky1138 8y ago
Little-known but very helpful feature of Youtube-dl: paste a URL to a playlist in, and it'll dutifully download every video in the playlist.
- tiatia123 8y ago
  Even better: it can use a batch file with URLs
- JackCh 8y ago
  It's helpful to use -i, --ignore-errors When doing that. By default, if a playlist contains a single video that's no longer available, youtube-dl will stop downloading the playlist when it hits that video. When playing a youtube playlist in mpv with youtube-dl, sometimes --load-unsafe-playlists is needed. This is rare however.
starmole 8y ago
See also: https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown
lgeorget 8y ago
A very useful and "secret" feature: you can give youtube-dl the URL of a playlist instead of a single video and it will download all of them.
- poisonarena 8y ago
  ...and specify to only grab the videos as mp3's to download that perfect song/mix playlist!
  - jsmthrowaway 8y ago
    Aspiring DJs do this, then play out the files they got from youtube-dl via Serato or whatever, then every other minimally competent DJ in the room immediately knows what’s happening based on how obviously shit it sounds. Practice mixing in headphones and playing room scale PA are two different ballgames, and when amplified, any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl. YouTube does more processing than people realize, and it doesn’t take much ear for me to identify a pirated crate (even beyond YouTube specifically). If you spin and use youtube-dl to build a crate, we all know, and we don’t respect you. You might win the crowd, but the people who actually bought into their profession and contributed to the community are also in attendance, and are very aware of your intrusion. You will quietly lose gigs without any explanation, and assume promoters simply can’t see your genius until you’re furiously working on 100 precious listens on SoundCloud. Fair use sampling? Go nuts and clean it up after youtube-dl. Five minute record? Make a Beatport account and get it overwith.
    - chupasaurus 8y ago
      > any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl Since YT now encodes sound tracks in Opus 160 kbps, if upload was in any decent quality, it will be downloaded in it too.
      - jsmthrowaway 8y ago
        Would you like a five minute lecture on frequency response and bandwidth of what you upload based on the dynamics compression, filtering, and other processing YouTube does to make videos sound good and all of which have nothing to do with a transport compression algorithm, but how said transport algorithms reduce bandwidth when double compressed because you’re probably not uploading 32-bit PCM to YouTube, and how none of that matters anyway because most people uploading to YouTube aren’t familiar with a spectrogram nor DC offset? (Seriously, one track I got via youtube-dl was the most offset I’d seen in my life. They either don’t fix it, or the fix goes horribly awry.) I’d simply offer it but this thread thinks I’m an angry ranter so I’m making you not cower in fear out of respect.
ggm 8y ago
I have a command sequence which is: 1) find something I like is not released in my economy to buy as an MP3 2) find a low(ish)fi video of the original artist playing it at some awesome gig you wish you could go to with the time machine 3) use youtube-dl to dl it, then post process into an mp3 or m4a 4) enjoy listening to glenn gould humming, or keith jarrett humming, or that time the bomb landed next to the string quartet playin in london in 1940, or the one where the film clip of lena horne singing 'stormy weather' is just the perfect version... I know that i'm outside the rules, but if they don't do something to let me pay for the IPR, but do put a video up free to air, I'm kind-of confused at this point: If I put dark glasses on, while I "watched" the youtube isn't it the same?
barking 8y ago
I presume this is only for the occasional thing that people are afraid will disappear from youtube or is there some other reason for downloading that I'm missing?
- Klover 8y ago
  It’s also the most reliable way to get hardware decoded YouTube on Linux. Firefox and Chrome don’t support it last I checked, and I’m not sure if they even have GPU rendering on Linux by default. Some players can hook into youtube-dl, so streaming is still possible.
- JoshTriplett 8y ago
  Not just for that, though that's a good reason. I use this to download for offline viewing (such as when traveling), or to download and number an entire playlist at a time into a directory full of video files.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- salvar 8y ago
  I downloaded a bunch of videos for watching on the train when my commute was 3 hours and the 4G connection was absolute shit. Youtube-dl saved my sanity.
- gkya 8y ago
  Youtube wants me to concede too much JS execution on too many domains (I block strictly), or else I can not skip the ads. It becomes a huge annoyance when I'm watching my favourite TV show that's also uploaded to YT and I have the same idiotic Grammarly ad in my face every 10 minutes. But I can easily run mpv <url> and watch, without looking at ads that are completely uninteresting and persistent enough to feel harassing to me (youtube is showing me grammarly ads since months, almost nothing else; so much that I loathe grammarly now). Also when watching a video, with mpv (which uses youtube-dl for youtube videos etc., I can pin a small video window on top of all other windows and continue doing other stuff on my laptop.
tzahola 8y ago
I used to use it frequently, but nowadays I just replace “youtube.com” with “hooktube.com” in the URL.
- JackCh 8y ago
  If you have ffmpeg, youtube-dl will let you mix and match any audio and video stream you choose, giving you a lot of options that hooktube simply doesn't. For instance you can combine a very small low quality video stream with a high quality audio stream, if you know you're mostly just going to be listening to the video.
martin-adams 8y ago
One thing I wonder is how dependant other YouTube creators are in being able to download YouTube videos so they can use it for commentary and parody. If YouTube made that significantly harder, would some creators suffer?
- JackCh 8y ago
  I bet most would start doing it with screen capture software/cards. I think many already are.
nachtigall 8y ago
The strength of youtube-dl is that – contradictionary to its name – there are `extractors` for almost every streaming, video, tv or radio website: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext... I always use it to rip TV or radio shows from German public stations
- madeofpalk 8y ago
  Reminds me of XBMC - Xbox Media Centre - (since renamed to Kodi) which runs on much more than Xbox (if it even runs on Xbox any more at all...)
  - speps 8y ago
    It's now an UWP app, so it's full circle and runs on Xbox One.
- s3m4j 8y ago
  I keep expecting the maintainers to change the name some day... I mainly use it to archive content from Arte. I'm usually not in the +7 days cycle their website has.
- popman 8y ago
  mpv (mpv.io) also has support for using it to stream videos. (play from the internet, rather than downloading) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ is available for firefox and chrome, and lets you open URLs from the context menu. Massive time saver, as you can just right click on a link to a video, and it'll start playing in a separate media player.
Cofike 8y ago
Love this library, I've used it with the python wrapper that makes it pretty easy to get going.
xab9 8y ago
I'm using a node version: https://github.com/fent/node-ytdl https://github.com/fent/node-ytdl The only bug I found is that name escaping sometimes breaks, but I usually name things manually. Ffmpeg audio conversion needs to be done manually, but that's just an extra line.
alde 8y ago
A cool fact is that mpv can hook into youtube-dl to play videos by youtube url. I use this a lot for music and 4k videos (mpv unlike browsers has good gpu decoding support on linux).
l5870uoo9y 8y ago
I have an alias setup in my .bash_profile to easily download and save as .mp3 file: > alias ymp3="youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3"
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- krylon 8y ago
  Thank you! I did not even know it could do that!
  - lozf 8y ago
    Better to just grab the widely supported AAC (m4a) audio, than perform a lossy to lossy transcode to mp3 if quality matters. For speech (lectures etc) low bitrate Opus sounds great and saves space when/where it matters, but isn't as widely compatible. e.g. youtube-dl -f 140 "$URL"
- tombrossman 8y ago
  In my ~/.bashrc, this works well for me. I did have to add --restrict-filenames after encountering some sites using really long titles that were problematic. ytdl() { mkdir /tmp/ytdl && cd /tmp/ytdl for URL in "$@" ; do youtube-dl -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' "$URL" --restrict-filenames; done ; mv /tmp/ytdl/* ~/Desktop/ rm -rf /tmp/ytdl exit }
- konraditurbe 8y ago
  Me too. I have also set it to burn thumbnail: alias mp3='youtube-dl -x --audio-format "mp3" --audio-quality 0 --embed-thumbnail $*'
rathish_g 8y ago
I am not sure if this official version of a Youtube is available everywhere. This will allow you to download youtube videos and even share them without the internet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.mango&hl=en_IN https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... Youtube for Kids is another app which is kid-friendly https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.kids&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...
techntoke 8y ago
One really cool feature from YouTube is automatic captioning. This creates subtitles based on speech recognition for nearly any video. Here are the settings in my mpv.conf that enables this: sub-font-size=32 slang=en ytdl-raw-options=write-auto-sub=,sub-lang=en
jaimehrubiks 8y ago
I created a somehow complete gui for youtube-dl, It is opensource in github and has a combination of youtube-dl, ffmpeg and mpv player. Written in java. It is called musicboo and I programmed it after learning java in my university. It has been working for some years perfectly with the automatic youtube-dl update system, although I have moved my backend many times preserving a domain. http://musicboo.hontzakdio.com/ http://musicboo.hontzakdio.com/

581 points by axiomdata316 8y ago

The program works on a huge list of streaming sites, not just YouTube. I believe it started as a YouTube only thing and then grew. Edit: Found the list of supported sites. https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/docs/supportedsites.md https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/docs/supported...

Firerouge 8y ago

For Mac users, this can be easily installed and updated using brew.

protomyth 8y ago
or macports
- iosDrone 8y ago
  Or brew :P
fooker 8y ago
I found brew's version of youtube-dl to be often out of date. Haven't tried recently, this was last year.
- computerfriend 8y ago
  It's one of my most frequently updated formulæ.
- predakanga 8y ago
  My compromise is to install brew's version of python, then use pip to install youtube-dl

rolodato 8y ago

"From YouTube.com" is a massive understatement. youtube-dl can download from pretty much any video site, including porn sites: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissue+label%3Ansfw https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Ais...

toomuchtodo 8y ago
Adding additional extractors is also trivial.
- voltagex_ 8y ago
  Have you got an example? I couldn't work out how to do it last time, but it's easier for me to get an Australian geoblocked site going than it is to submit a bug report and wait for someone to use a proxy.
  - rapfaria 8y ago
    You can search through pull requests to see a few examples, but I wouldn't say it's that simple. Login in and authentication can be very different for each website.
  - bschwindHN 8y ago
    All their extractors can be found here: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext...
omeid2 8y ago
All those NSFW labels. Maybe after all internet is made for pom.
- YaxelPerez 8y ago
  Correct me if I'm wrong but I think advances in video streaming tech were pioneered by "cam girls" (porn).

rodorgas 8y ago

When I want to download a video from a site I always think “it would be great if youtube-dl worked with this niche website, but I think it’s too specific”, then I try and it works, I’m always surprised.

faitswulff 8y ago
I had this moment when I decided to throw a crunchyroll url at it on a whim and it worked flawlessly.
Ajedi32 8y ago
It's a pretty extensive list: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext...
Synaesthesia 8y ago
Even works with twitch which I find really handy

adamnemecek 8y ago

I’m particular to jdownloader. http://jdownloader.org http://jdownloader.org Works on so many downloading services and also YouTube.

ekianjo 8y ago
its much bigger, size wise. Youtube-dl also works perfectly from the command line.
colejohnson66 8y ago
I like JDownloader, but it comes with adware and other things in its installer.
- wp381640 8y ago
  Run it on docker, I use jlesage/jdownloader-2
  - rekado 8y ago
    How does the problem of running some untrustworthy code get better by adding even more binaries? Is the goal just to use the kernel's process isolation features that you can access with `unshare`? Or do you mean to just bypass the installation step (because that purportedly contains adware)?

StavrosK 8y ago

The most useful part of youtube-dl is that it works with mpv, so you just pass a URL on the command line and MPV just plays the video in it. I have two monitors, so I put a button on my Firefox toolbar to launch MPV with the current URL, and configured MPV to start fullscreen on the second monitor immediately and quit when done. It's made my video-watching experience on the web an order of magnitude better.

ekianjo 8y ago
yup. you can a quick macro in qtebrowser as well. It gets rid of ads nicely too.
- gkya 8y ago
  I was using Qutebrowser since some months because I had some problems with how Firefox causing data loss, but I had to go back to Firefox recently because Qutebrowser is too slow and memory-consuming w/ many tabs open, even if suspended (i.e. >= 10 or 15 tabs for me). Firefox 61 now consumes way less memory and no idle CPU at all thanks to a strict Ublock Origin policy (basically no JS or >=1Mb images if you're not a snowflake; I had similar blocking in Qutebrowser too). Is this something you experience too, or maybe caused by my setup?
milkmiruku 8y ago
I set this up recently (the 'Play with MPV' method) after noting that viewing YouTube in the browser had a far greater CPU usage than watching the same in mpv. I've also given gtk-youtube-viewer a spin but it doesn't do "new videos of your subscriptions" (though it's command=line equivalent 'youtube-viewer -SV' does). Any recommendations out there for similar YouTube frontends? Also, at least in the UK, youtube-dl can access BBC iPlayer content without the login required on the web.
- meribold 8y ago
  You can use a feed reader. I have Newsboat set up with a feed that shows all my YouTube subscriptions and a macro that opens the URL from the selected item in mpv.

lettergram 8y ago

Ive been watching this repo for over a while. It's very active and I highly recommend trying it out. It's a pretty nifty project with a lot or activity.

voltagex_ 8y ago

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452765 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11452765 Some good discussion there.

pwaai 8y ago

I just hit download and I can watch any movie on Premium, but i appreciate this tool as well

dannyw 8y ago
Those downloads get removed if the uploader deletes the video.
- swebs 8y ago
  How does that work? Does it require giving Youtube access to your file system?
  - dannyw 8y ago
    Downloads only work within the app. Videos are DRM’d and you must connect to the internet at least once every 30 days to watch.

sevrex 8y ago

I've been using this for years and it is absolutley excellent

mxfh 8y ago

Since letting kids alone on youtube, is clusterf* of a nightmare, this is a godsend tool to archive approved channels to a local media server. This config file (with separate channel-list- and archive-files) template found here, has proven quite useful to me combined with some minimal batch job: https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/858ny5/my_youtubedl_config_downloading_entire_channels/ https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/858ny5/my_yout...

bitmapbrother 8y ago
>Since letting kids alone on youtube, is clusterf* of a nightmare, Could you have caked on more hyperbole? Yes, let's just let kids search the Internet and see what they come up with.
- salvar 8y ago
  I wouldn't call it hyperbole at all once you learn about Elsagate.
  - mxfh 8y ago
    Doesn't need to be elsagate level, stuff get's questionable to abusive (think unregulated child labor and unnessary emotional stress) really fast. It's worrysome on both producer and viewer side at pre-teen ages especially. Parenting against a hyper-engineered viewer retention (recommendation is an euphemism at this point) engine is a lost cause to begin with. Tried supervised youtube with my 3 year old for a while and it's always going places you would never expect, and not in a good way. Even for quality content, just look what wildbrain or DHX Media?, did in terms of ad-count, to "Yo Gabba Gabba" recently: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YN8bUHufPk&list=PLc7QkGFtZUZ73cexJsrEzjXkiKxv5qi_N https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2YN8bUHufPk&list=PLc7QkGFtZU... I count up 20 partly animated ad overlays plus a preroll in just 20m, who is willing to monitor that as a parent? The core of the problem I have with the whole thing, is that YouTube prays on the weakest of the weakest, not even me. It's children of parents that simply can't afford daycare and video subscription services, that I worry about the most.
8y ago

superkuh 8y ago

I've been using this ever since youtube dropped flash support. Early this year youtube began throttling certain file formats and qualities. The way around this is to call youtube-dl so that it uses an external downloader like, --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args "-j 8 -s 8" I wrap the entire thing up in some shell script as a .bashrc function which takes a URL, touches the downloaded file (since youtube-dl saves the youtube file modified date), then opens it in vlc.

pdkl95 8y ago
When I tried using aria2 to work around the throttling you mentioned, I noticed that simply using aria2 at all (no parallelism with -j/-s) fixed the download rate. The primary difference was the User-Agent header; the standard youtube-dl User-Agent[1] was throttled, but "aria2/1.30.0" was full speed. The throttling also seemed to depend on which server was sending the file; a bunch of recent uploads were throttled, while an obscure video from 8 years ago with <100 views only had the usual small slow-start delay that was common with videos that probably needed to be fetched completely uncached from from a remote data center. The throttling problem seemed to go away after a few weeks, and returned again for a few hours a . Is it possible the "throttling" was actually some type of bug or configuration error in Google's network and/or data archives? [1] https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/utils.py#L85 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/uti...
- predakanga 8y ago
  It's been my experience that only the split audio/video streams are throttled - it's possible that your obscure video didn't have those available for some reason, meaning that you got the unthrottled combined file. You can force this behaviour by using the "-f best" options, though that means you won't get certain resolutions (1080p) or codecs (opus). It's possible that this behaviour was designed to be pro-user; I can imagine a circumstance where a DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) client hit a patch of network congestion, dropped to a lower quality, then the network cleared up and it downloaded the rest of the video in low quality before it could switch back. Throttling the speeds to just above the bitrate of the video would solve that. Mind you, that doesn't explain the user-agent targeting described in other comments...

JohnKacz 8y ago

Gotta be careful sometimes. At least one tutorial video site I used it on (where an account was needed) I was blocked and had to open a ticket to re-enable my account by promising not to break their ToS which said something explicit about not downloading a bunch of their videos. (I was using it on whole courses and got flagged)

swyx 8y ago
i mean... you were breaking the TOS though. that was a risk you presumably are comfortable with.
- JohnKacz 8y ago
  Right. That's essentially what I was trying to say.
- jtbayly 8y ago
  I’m laughing at the thought of reading the Terms of Service. Anywhere.
  - batiudrami 8y ago
    knowing that downloading the videos/using them outside of what was expressly intended by the provider would be against the TOS is pretty intuitive though, no?
    - Dylan16807 8y ago
      I would not just assume that downloading courses I paid for is outside the intended purpose.
jethro_tell 8y ago
Yeah, gotta add && sleep 3600 and go to bed.

toomanybeersies 8y ago

Youtube-dl works with soundcloud as well, which is a useful feature. It can even download playlists and albums. It also has support for downloading images from Flickr, to an extent.

JackCh 8y ago
Youtube-dl works with nearly everything. It's incredibly versatile.

sergiotapia 8y ago

This may be my most favorite piece of software I have installed. Does what it says on the tin, nothing more nothing less. LASER-focused, I really love that about it. mpv also comes close as great software.

fooker 8y ago
Significantly more, actually. It can download videos from just about any website, and yes, including and especially NSFW ones.
shmerl 8y ago
mpv is using youtube-dl itself.
- s3m4j 8y ago
  Which is great with twitch. Instant benefits : no chat, video decoding outside browser. On some laptops it makes a big difference.
BeetleB 8y ago
Going off topic, but I must be one of those weird people who prefers mplayer to mpv. When watching a video, I like not knowing how long the video is. The OSD in mpv spoils it for me. With mplayer, I can set in a config file to have OSD off by default. Couldn't figure out how to do it with mpv. I think I had a few other things in my config that isn't supported by mpv (and some where the mpv team explicitly said they won't - mpv is mplayer without the bloat, after all).
- kqr 8y ago
  Huh, I wish I knew what you were talking about. I have used mpv for many years now, and I have no OSD while watching -- only when pausing, seeking, and otherwise interacting with it.
  - BeetleB 8y ago

etaioinshrdlu 8y ago

The elephant in the room is obviously that this is probably illegal under DMCA.

otakucode 8y ago
Hrmm... I'm not sure. At any point in the protocol is there a "copyright bit"? It only takes one bit, and it doesn't even have to be documented as serving that purpose. The StreamboxVCR case ended up cementing into law (because the Streambox people ran out of money and couldn't appear to answer the last appeal by RealNetworks) that disobeying one undocumented bit is all it takes to run afoul of section 1201 of the DMCA. I imagine there might be such a bit in the YouTube stream but I don't know. I'm also not sure how you could defend in court that creating the temporary copy in memory for purposes of playing a stream is given permission, but creating a more permanent one is not. Courts have held that transitory copies in memory are actual copies, and can constitute real infringement, but obviously YouTube gives implicit permission to users to the creation of that copy, and youtube-dl doesn't actually create any additional copies beside that, it just keeps it.
olefoo 8y ago
Which is one of the aspects of why the DMCA is such bad law and DRM in general is a complete waste of time. If you hand someone a stream of bits and a decryption key that turns it into a movie. They will figure out how to keep the decrypted movie around if they want or need to do that. So then you get into a coevolutionary arms race where content licensing organizations feel they have the right to imposes draconian restrictions on peoples personal electronics. And mandated spyware is not really ethical either.
JackCh 8y ago
If by "elephant in the room" you mean "something nobody gives a single shit about." Seriously, why should I care? Should File->Save Page As... be considered the "elephant in the room" when Firefox is discussed?
- dredmorbius 8y ago
  EitR has more to do with known risks whose acknowledgement is inconvenient. It's not a matter of DGAF, but rather, ignoring in the hopes that it will go away, or the risk will fall on another. https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.html https://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/elephant-in-the-room.htm...

ryuuchin 8y ago

There's also ytdl integration in mpv[1]. The excellent open source media player. So anything you can download with ytdl you can stream in mpv. [1] https://mpv.io https://mpv.io

jamklda 8y ago
MPC-BE has Youtube-dl integration aswell https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/mpcbe/

EvanAnderson 8y ago

I feel like the first rule of youtube-dl is not to talk about youtube-dl. I keep expecting Google (and all the other sites it works on) to start taking active measures to disable it. At some point YouTube is going to require an EME module to play even "free" videos.

userbinator 8y ago
While I agree with you in principle (and have used a very similar setup for many years), I don't think HN is pro-DRM/IP enough to worry. At some point YouTube is going to require an EME module to play even "free" videos. ...which will be cracked within days if not hours.
- majewsky 8y ago
  > which will be cracked within days if not hours. Netflix requires an EME module since quite some time, and I'm not aware of any successful cracks.
  - deno 8y ago
    All Netflix-exclusive shows are available up to 4K on torrent networks: https://thepiratebay.org/search/house%20of%20cards%202160p/0/99/0 https://thepiratebay.org/search/house%20of%20cards%202160p/0... https://thepiratebay.org/search/orange%20is%20the%20new%20black%202160p/0/99/0 https://thepiratebay.org/search/orange%20is%20the%20new%20bl... https://1337x.to/search/ozark+2160p/1/ https://1337x.to/search/ozark+2160p/1/ What’s left to steal? Meanwhile the majority of Netflix customers is limited to 720p video like it’s 2001. [1] [1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763 https://help.netflix.com/en/node/55763
    - realusername 8y ago
      > Google Chrome up to 720p Internet Explorer up to 1080p Microsoft Edge up to 4K* Mozilla Firefox up to 720p Opera up to 720p Windows 8 app up to 1080p Windows 10 app up to 4K* (from your link). And people wonder why I still use torrents...

shibel 8y ago

I’ve actually used this one for quite a nifty Python script: Invoke a Workflow from a YouTube video on my iPhone -> Dropbox file gets appended with all the details of video -> Hazel is watching this file and triggers the Python script -> which converts the video to MP3, slaps on relevant tags and cover-art and uploads it to my iCloud Music Library [1]. So I can have an MP3 song on my iPhone minutes after I’ve watched the video on YouTube. [1] I do have Apple Music & Spotify [2], this is primarily for live/rare versions, and piano covers that I like. [2] need both for testing, “officialy” launching https://www.musicbutler.io https://www.musicbutler.io soon. /shamelessplug

xfer 8y ago
A lot of anime/game music is not on any streaming service; so youtube-dl is the only option.
- Karrot_Kream 8y ago
  There are tons of anime music torrents out there, and even groups that let you xdcc download from IRC
- shibel 8y ago
  Yep. I would rather and do pay for music. As said I use this predominantly for obscure stuff.
- BigJono 8y ago
  It's especially bad with games because music gets updated and changed all the time. Official soundtracks often leave tracks out, take for example Civilization V which has an official soundtrack with like 30 tracks, when the game itself has more like 300. It's up to avid players of the game to compile and document the full collection. Game developers by and large don't give a shit if the musician's work is preserved. If they don't make an effort then as far as I'm concerned they're forfeiting their right to take issue with the morality of downloading their game's music.
  - TAForObvReasons 8y ago

bane 8y ago

There's a stupid easy to use gui for this as well. https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui https://github.com/MrS0m30n3/youtube-dl-gui

eurticket 8y ago

Please stop talking about this, I love how it is now!

QasimK 8y ago
But if people didn’t talk about this, I would have have known that I could use it to watch BBC iPlayer without going through the annoying login-wall!
- Synaesthesia 8y ago
  Wow that’s really useful to know. It also works for YouTube vids which are blocked in your country. :-)
  - crtasm 8y ago
    It does? I used it to grab a full series of an 90s movie reviews show and some episodes were 'unavailable in your region'. Some other episodes had the different error of unavailable due to copyright claim by [various movie distributors].
    - Synaesthesia 8y ago
      It did work for me with cricket clips only available in India ..
- crtasm 8y ago
  Very useful! Did you hear about get_iPlayer too?
  - QasimK 8y ago
    No, amazing!

palad1n 8y ago

I tried downloading a video I purchased on Youtube but what got retrieved I could not view. The DRM seems to have prevented this from working.

caractacus 8y ago
What was the video?

shmerl 8y ago

youtube-dl does a good job of merging DASH streams into proper media files. It can also parse various audio sites, and I think it's what mpv is using for Bandcamp for example. Try this: mpv https://danielamosboots.bandcamp.com/track/triangle-square

beebmam 8y ago

I think youtube-dl/archiver tools present some ethical problems. If you're publishing something for commercial, do you have a right to one day revoke that item you've published? I think many would say that no, you don't have that right. Fair use and all that. But if you're publishing your diary or some other personal items about your life, not for something commercial, then I think many would argue that yes, you should have that right. To have the right to make all data about you disappear. I'm pretty sure RMS explored these ethics before in some of his writings. Personally, I'm a user of youtube-dl and have written some tools based on cloud tech that helps me automate archival of all media I come across that I find valuable. But I'm not so sure it's completely ethical in all cases.

exabrial 8y ago
You should assume anything you let leave your own device is permanent. Anything else is a pretty big pipe dream
JackCh 8y ago
Do I have the right to go into peoples homes and root through their archived correspondence to find and burn lengthy personal Christmas letters I once sent them? If instead of writing a letter I made a video and sent them a link, and they decided to keep the video around, that would be no different. They would have no moral right to republish that letter/video, but I would have no moral right to take their copy from them.
BeetleB 8y ago
If I published my diary or something personal in a newspaper, I would not have that right. If you upload to youtube and make it public, then that's exactly what it is - public. You may have the right to pull it from Youtube one day, but that's the extent of it.

rocky1138 8y ago

Little-known but very helpful feature of Youtube-dl: paste a URL to a playlist in, and it'll dutifully download every video in the playlist.

tiatia123 8y ago
Even better: it can use a batch file with URLs
JackCh 8y ago
It's helpful to use -i, --ignore-errors When doing that. By default, if a playlist contains a single video that's no longer available, youtube-dl will stop downloading the playlist when it hits that video. When playing a youtube playlist in mpv with youtube-dl, sometimes --load-unsafe-playlists is needed. This is rare however.

starmole 8y ago

See also: https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown https://www.jwz.org/hacks/youtubedown

lgeorget 8y ago

A very useful and "secret" feature: you can give youtube-dl the URL of a playlist instead of a single video and it will download all of them.

poisonarena 8y ago
...and specify to only grab the videos as mp3's to download that perfect song/mix playlist!
- jsmthrowaway 8y ago
  Aspiring DJs do this, then play out the files they got from youtube-dl via Serato or whatever, then every other minimally competent DJ in the room immediately knows what’s happening based on how obviously shit it sounds. Practice mixing in headphones and playing room scale PA are two different ballgames, and when amplified, any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl. YouTube does more processing than people realize, and it doesn’t take much ear for me to identify a pirated crate (even beyond YouTube specifically). If you spin and use youtube-dl to build a crate, we all know, and we don’t respect you. You might win the crowd, but the people who actually bought into their profession and contributed to the community are also in attendance, and are very aware of your intrusion. You will quietly lose gigs without any explanation, and assume promoters simply can’t see your genius until you’re furiously working on 100 precious listens on SoundCloud. Fair use sampling? Go nuts and clean it up after youtube-dl. Five minute record? Make a Beatport account and get it overwith.
  - chupasaurus 8y ago
    > any youtube-dl format is as obvious to me as a file being ripped from source vinyl Since YT now encodes sound tracks in Opus 160 kbps, if upload was in any decent quality, it will be downloaded in it too.
    - jsmthrowaway 8y ago
      Would you like a five minute lecture on frequency response and bandwidth of what you upload based on the dynamics compression, filtering, and other processing YouTube does to make videos sound good and all of which have nothing to do with a transport compression algorithm, but how said transport algorithms reduce bandwidth when double compressed because you’re probably not uploading 32-bit PCM to YouTube, and how none of that matters anyway because most people uploading to YouTube aren’t familiar with a spectrogram nor DC offset? (Seriously, one track I got via youtube-dl was the most offset I’d seen in my life. They either don’t fix it, or the fix goes horribly awry.) I’d simply offer it but this thread thinks I’m an angry ranter so I’m making you not cower in fear out of respect.

ggm 8y ago

I have a command sequence which is: 1) find something I like is not released in my economy to buy as an MP3 2) find a low(ish)fi video of the original artist playing it at some awesome gig you wish you could go to with the time machine 3) use youtube-dl to dl it, then post process into an mp3 or m4a 4) enjoy listening to glenn gould humming, or keith jarrett humming, or that time the bomb landed next to the string quartet playin in london in 1940, or the one where the film clip of lena horne singing 'stormy weather' is just the perfect version... I know that i'm outside the rules, but if they don't do something to let me pay for the IPR, but do put a video up free to air, I'm kind-of confused at this point: If I put dark glasses on, while I "watched" the youtube isn't it the same?

barking 8y ago

I presume this is only for the occasional thing that people are afraid will disappear from youtube or is there some other reason for downloading that I'm missing?

Klover 8y ago
It’s also the most reliable way to get hardware decoded YouTube on Linux. Firefox and Chrome don’t support it last I checked, and I’m not sure if they even have GPU rendering on Linux by default. Some players can hook into youtube-dl, so streaming is still possible.
JoshTriplett 8y ago
Not just for that, though that's a good reason. I use this to download for offline viewing (such as when traveling), or to download and number an entire playlist at a time into a directory full of video files.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
salvar 8y ago
I downloaded a bunch of videos for watching on the train when my commute was 3 hours and the 4G connection was absolute shit. Youtube-dl saved my sanity.
gkya 8y ago
Youtube wants me to concede too much JS execution on too many domains (I block strictly), or else I can not skip the ads. It becomes a huge annoyance when I'm watching my favourite TV show that's also uploaded to YT and I have the same idiotic Grammarly ad in my face every 10 minutes. But I can easily run mpv <url> and watch, without looking at ads that are completely uninteresting and persistent enough to feel harassing to me (youtube is showing me grammarly ads since months, almost nothing else; so much that I loathe grammarly now). Also when watching a video, with mpv (which uses youtube-dl for youtube videos etc., I can pin a small video window on top of all other windows and continue doing other stuff on my laptop.

tzahola 8y ago

I used to use it frequently, but nowadays I just replace “youtube.com” with “hooktube.com” in the URL.

JackCh 8y ago
If you have ffmpeg, youtube-dl will let you mix and match any audio and video stream you choose, giving you a lot of options that hooktube simply doesn't. For instance you can combine a very small low quality video stream with a high quality audio stream, if you know you're mostly just going to be listening to the video.

martin-adams 8y ago

One thing I wonder is how dependant other YouTube creators are in being able to download YouTube videos so they can use it for commentary and parody. If YouTube made that significantly harder, would some creators suffer?

JackCh 8y ago
I bet most would start doing it with screen capture software/cards. I think many already are.

nachtigall 8y ago

The strength of youtube-dl is that – contradictionary to its name – there are `extractors` for almost every streaming, video, tv or radio website: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/extractor https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_dl/ext... I always use it to rip TV or radio shows from German public stations

madeofpalk 8y ago
Reminds me of XBMC - Xbox Media Centre - (since renamed to Kodi) which runs on much more than Xbox (if it even runs on Xbox any more at all...)
- speps 8y ago
  It's now an UWP app, so it's full circle and runs on Xbox One.
s3m4j 8y ago
I keep expecting the maintainers to change the name some day... I mainly use it to archive content from Arte. I'm usually not in the +7 days cycle their website has.
popman 8y ago
mpv (mpv.io) also has support for using it to stream videos. (play from the internet, rather than downloading) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/open-with/ is available for firefox and chrome, and lets you open URLs from the context menu. Massive time saver, as you can just right click on a link to a video, and it'll start playing in a separate media player.

Cofike 8y ago

Love this library, I've used it with the python wrapper that makes it pretty easy to get going.

xab9 8y ago

I'm using a node version: https://github.com/fent/node-ytdl https://github.com/fent/node-ytdl The only bug I found is that name escaping sometimes breaks, but I usually name things manually. Ffmpeg audio conversion needs to be done manually, but that's just an extra line.

alde 8y ago

A cool fact is that mpv can hook into youtube-dl to play videos by youtube url. I use this a lot for music and 4k videos (mpv unlike browsers has good gpu decoding support on linux).

l5870uoo9y 8y ago

I have an alias setup in my .bash_profile to easily download and save as .mp3 file: > alias ymp3="youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3"

deleted 8y ago
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krylon 8y ago
Thank you! I did not even know it could do that!
- lozf 8y ago
  Better to just grab the widely supported AAC (m4a) audio, than perform a lossy to lossy transcode to mp3 if quality matters. For speech (lectures etc) low bitrate Opus sounds great and saves space when/where it matters, but isn't as widely compatible. e.g. youtube-dl -f 140 "$URL"
tombrossman 8y ago
In my ~/.bashrc, this works well for me. I did have to add --restrict-filenames after encountering some sites using really long titles that were problematic. ytdl() { mkdir /tmp/ytdl && cd /tmp/ytdl for URL in "$@" ; do youtube-dl -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' "$URL" --restrict-filenames; done ; mv /tmp/ytdl/* ~/Desktop/ rm -rf /tmp/ytdl exit }
konraditurbe 8y ago
Me too. I have also set it to burn thumbnail: alias mp3='youtube-dl -x --audio-format "mp3" --audio-quality 0 --embed-thumbnail $*'

rathish_g 8y ago

I am not sure if this official version of a Youtube is available everywhere. This will allow you to download youtube videos and even share them without the internet. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.mango&hl=en_IN https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and... Youtube for Kids is another app which is kid-friendly https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.android.apps.youtube.kids&hl=en https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

techntoke 8y ago

One really cool feature from YouTube is automatic captioning. This creates subtitles based on speech recognition for nearly any video. Here are the settings in my mpv.conf that enables this: sub-font-size=32 slang=en ytdl-raw-options=write-auto-sub=,sub-lang=en

jaimehrubiks 8y ago

I created a somehow complete gui for youtube-dl, It is opensource in github and has a combination of youtube-dl, ffmpeg and mpv player. Written in java. It is called musicboo and I programmed it after learning java in my university. It has been working for some years perfectly with the automatic youtube-dl update system, although I have moved my backend many times preserving a domain. http://musicboo.hontzakdio.com/ http://musicboo.hontzakdio.com/