youtube-dl

Related articles

• mpv
• FFmpeg

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.

Installation

Install the youtube-dl package, or youtube-dl-git^AUR for the development version.

Usage

See youtube-dl(1).

$ youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL

Tip: In some cases (like YouTube) URL can be substituted with the video ID.

Format selection

In cases where multiple formats of a video are available, youtube-dl will default to downloading the best possible version. If you'd like to choose a specific format to download, first get a list of the available formats:

$ youtube-dl -F URL

Note the format code for the version you want, and then run:

$ youtube-dl -f format URL

You can often download audio-only or video-only formats this way. If you have FFmpeg, you can download both a video-only and audio-only format and mux them together into a single file:

$ youtube-dl -f video_format+audio_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

Increasing download speeds

Some websites throttle download speeds. You can often increase speeds by using Aria2, an external downloader which supports multi-connection downloads. Example:

$ youtube-dl --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -x 5 -k 2M' URL

Trim (partial download)

Parts of DASH 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.