youtube-dl
youtube-dl is a command-line program that lets you easily download videos and audio from more than a thousand websites. See the list of supported sites.
Contents
Installation
Install the youtube-dl package, or youtube-dl-gitAUR for the development version. It is recommended to also install ffmpeg as it is used for muxing for some sites.
Usage
See youtube-dl(1).
$ youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL
Format selection
In cases where multiple formats of a video are available, youtube-dl will download the best ones by default.
To select a specific one to download, first get a list of the available formats:
$ youtube-dl -F URL
Note the code of the format you want, then run:
$ youtube-dl -f format URL
Extract audio
Use -x for audio-only downloads (requires FFmpeg).
$ youtube-dl -x -f bestaudio URL
Configuration
The system-wide configuration file is /etc/youtube-dl.conf and the user-specific configuration file is ~/.config/youtube-dl/config. The syntax is simply one command-line option per line. Example configuration:
~/.config/youtube-dl/config
# Save in ~/Videos -o ~/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s # Prefer 1080p or lower resolutions -f (bestvideo[height<=1080]/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]/best
See [1] for more information.
Tips and tricks
Faster downloads
Some websites throttle transfer speeds. You can often get around this by using Aria2, an external downloader which supports multi-connection downloads. For example:
$ youtube-dl --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -j 3 -x 3 -s 3 -k 1M' URL
Trim (partial download)
Parts of videos can be downloaded by using the output of youtube-dl -g -f format URL as ffmpeg input with the -ss, -t and -c copy options.
URL from clipboard
A shell alias or a keyboard shortcut can be set to download a video (or audio) of a selected (or copied) URL by outputting it from the X selection. See Clipboard#Tools.
See also
- GitHub repository for documentation.