3 ms·

According to the docs it formats them as "best" by default. --audio-quality QUALITY "best", "aac", "vorbis", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", or "wav"; "best" by

• rossy 12y ago
  When you convert audio from a lossy format to a lossy format (from YouTube's native AAC streams to MP3,) you always end up with worse quality than the original, regardless of the encoding settings. Since pretty much everything can play AAC, there's no point in converting it in the first place. Just remove --audio-format mp3, and you'll get an .m4a straight from YouTube with no conversion step.
  • rational-future 12y ago
    That's right, usually the best quality audio you can get from youtube is in m4a format. The only problem I'm having is youtube sets the format inside the m4a to dash, which some stupid players (including iTunes) don't want to play. So I have to run something like ffmpeg.exe -i "Keith Wiley - The Fermi Paradox, Self-Replicating Probes, Interstellar Transport Bandwidth-AUk6ZlePtQA.m4a" -c:a copy 2.m4a to change the format in the file header to M4A.
    • stinos 12y ago
      Winamp and VLC also don't play these..
    • shmerl 12y ago
      By the way, is DASH a free technology, or it's patent encumbered like the rest of the MPEG stuff?