youtube-dl cheatsheet

youtube-dl

Today lets talk about a command-line tool that we can use to download YouTube videos. Its called `youtube-dl`, you may have heard it and use it. But today I am gonna tell you some hidden secrets of it.

There are many guides about how to install it in Linux environment. But I highly recommend to follow the steps given in there official-site. If you use sudo apt install youtube-dl it would work, but it will install some previous version of youtube-dl. You would get errors or warnings with some videos you try to download. You can also use pip for installing as youtube-dl written in python.

Also youtube-dl is not restricted for YouTube, you can use it to download any video you want, you just need to have the url.

For all Linux and MacOS users :

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

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Done, you have successfully installed youtube-dl latest version.

Download a YouTube video

youtube-dl youtube-video-url

This will download the best quality video. You can select what is the video quality you want to download. Happy reading, you would find it later in this articular.

Downloading a playlist

youtube-dl -cit youtube-playlist-url

Here you just have to paste the YouTube playlist url. youtube-dl will automatically download the full playlist for you.

Here

-c — Countinue the download

-i — Ignore errors

-t — With titles

This is a cheatsheet, so I am not going to explain what these options do in later sections. But you can read them all from youtube-dl official documentation.

Download specific videos from a playlist

When you just need some certain videos to download from a play list, you can use.

As an example, if you just need to download from 5th to 10th video. you can use :

youtube-dl --playlist-items 5-10 youtube-playlist-url

Video quality selection

If you no need to have the best quality video to be downloaded, you can easily select the best quality you want to have using following commands.

First we have to find,what are the available qualities for the video:

youtube-dl -F youtube-video-url

Output would be like :

[youtube] youtube-url: Downloading webpage
[youtube] youtube-url: Downloading video info webpage
[info] Available formats for youtube-url:
format code  extension  resolution note
249          webm       audio only DASH audio   51k , opus @ 50k, 5.87MiB
250          webm       audio only DASH audio   80k , opus @ 70k, 8.53MiB
140          m4a        audio only DASH audio  131k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 14.99MiB
251          webm       audio only DASH audio  144k , opus @160k, 15.32MiB
242          webm       426x240    240p  112k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 4.96MiB
135          mp4        854x480    480p  130k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 6.47MiB
136          mp4        1280x720   720p  227k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 10.71MiB
243          webm       640x360    360p  236k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 7.56MiB
244          webm       854x480    480p  358k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 10.64MiB
137          mp4        1920x1080  1080p  576k , avc1.640028, 30fps, video only, 30.06MiB
247          webm       1280x720   720p  668k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 17.77MiB
248          webm       1920x1080  1080p 1445k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 48.80MiB
43           webm       640x360    medium , vp8.0, vorbis@128k, 31.06MiB
18           mp4        640x360    medium  309k , avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2@ 96k (44100Hz), 35.83MiB
22           mp4        1280x720   hd720  221k , avc1.64001F, mp4a.40.2@192k (44100Hz) (best)

Here you have to be careful, as you can see 248 webm 1920x1080 1080p 1445k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 48.80MiB

if you select this option, it will download only the video, not sound track. Oh, I forgot to mention earlier. youtube-dl downloads video and audio separately. Video first and then audio. Then it automatically merge them properly.

Downloading the video format you want
youtube-dl -f 18 youtube-video-url
Here it will download medium quality video. 360p as I remember.

Downloading as mp3

If you are a mp3 audio fan, you can easily download just mp3 format. You can use two ways, first as I explained above, using -F and finding audio only format. Using above sample output :

251          webm       audio only DASH audio  144k , opus @160k, 15.32MiB

so you just have to use youtube-dl -f 251 youtube-video-url

If you just need mp3 audio only, then you have to use:

youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 youtube-video-url

Possible errors :

/usr/bin/env: ‘python’: No such file or directory

to solve this you can use : python3 /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Simply make an alias for this as youtube-dl.

These are the basics youtube-dl commands, there are tons of them described in their documentation. If I have missed a useful cheat command, please comment it out.