Claus Conrad

yt-dlp

3 min read

Resources

Tutorial for Windows users

Installation

  1. Start “Ubuntu” from the start menu
  2. If it is not installed:
    1. Start “Terminal” from the start menu
    2. Enter wsl --install and press Enter
    3. If asked, confirm that you want to elevate permissions (click “Yes”)
    4. Restart the computer when the screen tells you to
    5. Start “Ubuntu” from the start menu
    6. Enter a username, e.g. your name, all lowercase letters
    7. Enter a password and save it somewhere, the characters will not be shown while you type, and press Enter
    8. Re-enter the same password and press Enter
  3. Copy the following command, right-click in Ubuntu to paste it, and press Enter: 
    sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python
    Enter the password from step 2.g above and press Enter
  4. Copy the following command, right-click in Ubuntu to paste it, and press Enter: 
    sudo apt install python3-pip
    Enter the password from step 2.g above and press Enter
  5. Copy the following command, right-click in Ubuntu to paste it, and press Enter: 
    sudo python3 -m pip install https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/archive/master.tar.gz
    Enter the password from step 2.g above and press Enter

Whenever you want to download one video

  1. Copy the following command, replace USERNAME with your Windows username, then copy it again, right-click in Ubuntu to paste it, and press Enter: 
    cd /mnt/c/Users/USERNAME/Downloads
    If you log in to Windows with a Microsoft account, your username is typically the first part (before the @) of your email address.
  2. Type the following command in Ubuntu, replacing “URL” with the address of the webpage that contains the video, and press Enter:
yt-dlp "URL"
  1. The video should now be downloaded to your Downloads folder. Keep the Ubuntu window open until the $ sign reappears (until it is ready for you to type another command).

Whenever you want to download several videos

  1. Open Notepad
  2. Paste all the URLs from YouTube into Notepad, one per line
  3. Save the text file in your Downloads folder with the filename “videos.txt”
  4. Copy the following command, replace USERNAME with your Windows username, then copy it again, right-click in Ubuntu to paste it, and press Enter: 
    cd /mnt/c/Users/USERNAME/Downloads
    If you log in to Windows with a Microsoft account, your username is typically the first part (before the @) of your email address.
  5. Copy the following command, right-click in Ubuntu to paste it, and press Enter:
yt-dlp -i -a videos.txt
  1. The videos should now be downloaded to your Downloads folder. Keep the Ubuntu window open until the $ sign reappears (until it is ready for you to type another command).

FAQ

Requested formats are incompatible for merge

If however you are really keen to get the best quality video and the best quality video audio but only in an mp4 container (thus bypassing the mkv warning and subsequent Matrosk container output from youtube-dl) you can use something like the following:

youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]' URL

Source

Do not stop downloading when one of the files fails

  • Add -i to the command line parameters to continue downloading after a failing file

Download playlist as MP3

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 -o "%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist --ignore-errors "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw-XXXXXXX"

Show available formats

yt-dlp -F VIDEO_URL

Download audio and video streams separately and merge

yt-dlp -f VIDEO_FORMAT_ID+AUDIO_FORMAT_ID --merge-output-format mp4 VIDEO_URL

Download all from YouTube “Watch Later” as MP4

Replace $BROWSER$ with e.g. “chrome”, “safari”, “edge” etc.

yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser $BROWSER$ --download-archive archive.txt --no-overwrites --ignore-errors --recode-video mp4 --embed-metadata --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata --format "bestvideo[ext=mp4][vcodec~='h264']?+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best" "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=WL"

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