Table of Contents
Youtube-dl
Great tool for downloading from Youtube, and elsewhere.
It's currently unmaintained, so I've switched to a fork called Yt-dlp to get around slow speeds downloading from Youtube.
Useful Arguments
-F | List available formats for the video. |
|---|---|
-f [code] | Format, use code from -F list. Default is highest quality. |
-i | Ignore errors. Sometimes comes in handy when trivial errors are holding things up. |
-o | Lets you set a template to format the filenames of the output. |
-v | Verbose process info. Good if something's going wrong. |
-w | Don't overwrite files. |
Configuration
You can put any argument in the file ~/.config/youtube-dl/config, and it will add them any time it runs.
So it's an easy way to specify a common download location and naming template, for example.
Mine just looks like this:
# Output template --output ~/Downloads/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s
Uses
Video
YTDL will automatically grab the best-quality version, so often youtube-dl [url] is sufficient.
Getting Audio from Videos
Good for getting music on there, though if you can find it somewhere else in a not-video format it'll probably be better quality? Still, this comes in really handy when you just want to share a song or something.
youtube-dl -F [url]to list formats, thenyoutube-dl -f [number] [url]to download selected.- OR
youtube-dl --audio-format best -xwill just grab the best quality one. - Either option'll be a silly format like .m4a or .opus, so if you want to convert it to .mp3 or .ogg (for example) use FFmpeg
ffmpeg -i [filename.m4a] [filename.mp3|ogg]
Channel
You can grab all the videos from a channel too!
youtube-dl [url]
So just like normal, but you add the channel's URL instead of the video's.
GUI
Been researching making or installing a web interface to combine with a YTDL setup on my NAS. Here're some links:
- Rudloff/alltube - Seems overly complicated?
Links
- Yt-dlp - Fork with more features, and project activity.