Youtube-dl

As part of Audio Video Editing in Linux How To, It can be very easy to upload something YouTube, lose the original source video, and have only the YouTube version remaining. What is the easiest way to retrieve a copy of your YouTube videos.

Youtube-dl is a nifty little tool you can use to grab videos from YouTube and several other video-streaming services. It's super straightforward to use:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2m5nW9CQLJ0

This command downloads the video at the URL indicated and saves it locally.

Youtube-dl has several options for controlling the quality and format of the downloaded video, but I find it easier to use the command above. It downloads the highest quality audio and video into a single file, then I use FFmpeg to convert them into the format I want.

To download best quality of Audio & Video in mp4

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

download two files (bestaudio[ext=mp4] and bestvideo[ext=m4a]) without any transcoding

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/272868/download-only-format-mp4-on-youtube-dl/272934

To download a playlist(Starting at 36)

–playlist-start 36 playlisturl

Sample - https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4lJLtpfKDUEUofMMkp9XO0l8vM10BMAh

–playlist-start NUMBER Playlist video to start at (default is 1)

–playlist-end NUMBER Playlist video to end at (default is last)

–playlist-items ITEM_SPEC Playlist video items to download. Specify

indices of the videos in the playlist

separated by commas like: "–playlist-items

1,2,5,8" if you want to download videos

indexed 1, 2, 5, 8 in the playlist. You can

specify range: "–playlist-items

1-3,7,10-13", it will download the videos

at index 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/48422377/youtube-downloading-a-playlist-youtube-dl

To download audio only (default ogg opus format)

$ youtube-dl -x url

To download audio only (mp3 format)

$ youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 url

$ sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl

$ sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
$ sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

$ sudo youtube-dl -U