youtube-dl

Install youtube-dl

  1. Download the latest youtube-dl file from here: https://github.com/ytdl-org/ytdl-nightly/releases

  2. Move it to ~/bin and make it executable

    mv youtube-dl ~/bin
chmod +x ~/bin/youtube-dl

List available formats

youtube-dl -F URL

Download video

If there’s a format that includes audio and video, you can just use that format code, e.g.

youtube-dl -f 22 https://example.com/video

Otherwise, you can give the video and audio format codes and youtube-dl will combine them, e.g.

youtube-dl -f 135+140 https://example.com/video

Save a download archive file

This is useful when downloading many videos to make sure you don’t accidentally download the same one multiple times:

youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt ...

TODO: Is this still needed? youtube-dl seems to be smart enough to tell if a video’s already been downloaded

Auto selecting video stream and changing output filename

youtube-dl -f 'worstvideo[height=540]+AACHEv1-2_0-English' -o '%(series)s - S%(season_number)02dE%(episode_number)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s' --download-archive archive.txt URL

Download playlist

Just use the URL of the playlist and youtube-dl will download it:

youtube-dl --playlist-start 4 -i -f 'worstvideo[height=540]+AACHEv1-2_0-English' -o '%(series)s - S%(season_number)02dE%(episode_number)02d - %(title)s.%(ext)s' --download-archive archive.txt URL
  • (Recommended) -i: “Continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist”

Download multiple files without a playlist

  1. Get the URLs for all the files you want to download and put them in a text file

  2. Figure out the format you want using the steps above with one of the video URLs

  3. Download all the videos by looping through the text file, e.g.

    starting_episode=1; episode=$starting_episode; for url in $(cat playlist.txt); do youtube-dl -f 'worstvideo[height=540]+audio-English' -o "S01E0${episode}.mp4" "$url"; episode=$((episode+1)); done
    • Replace starting_episode, playlist.txt, worstvideo[height=540]+audio-English, and S01E0${episode}.mp4 as appropriate

Working with local .m3u8 files

Sometimes .m3u8 (HLS playlist) URLs are too long to paste into a terminal, so you can work with them locally instead.

  1. Download the .m3u8 file in the browser

  2. Start a local HTTP server to serve the file, e.g.

    python3 -m http.server 8000

  3. Download the video using the local .m3u8 file URL, e.g.

    youtube-dl http://localhost:8000/file.m3u8