Best Tool for Downloading YouTube Videos and Playlists
How many times does it happen that you stumble upon an awesome youtube video, you make up your mind to download it but fail short to find a good tool which actually works?
In this post I want to introduce one of the best tools for downloading videos from YouTube and other video platforms – youtube-dl. This command line tool is basically just a python script released by its developers in public domain and it works on any platform that supports Python 2.x or later including Linux, Windows or Mac OS X.
If you are on Ubuntu, you can directly install it by using:
k4rtik: $ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
If not, just go to youtube-dl download page and save the script in your home directory. Then make the script executable by using the following command:
k4rtik: $ chmod +x youtube-dl
You can also consider moving the script to your /usr/local/bin directory to invoke it directly without specifying the path:
k4rtik: $ sudo mv youtube-dl /usr/local/bin
In its most basic form you can use this tool to download the highest quality of video by just supplying the url of the video as its argument, e.g.:
k4rtik: Videos $ youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk62hRBDLGc
Setting language
Rk62hRBDLGc: Downloading video webpage
Rk62hRBDLGc: Downloading video info webpage
Rk62hRBDLGc: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: Rk62hRBDLGc.flv
[download] 100.0% of 5.38M at 88.81k/s ETA 00:00
k4rtik: Videos $
My preferred way of downloading videos is by using the -t flag, which saves the video with the title in the file name, e.g.:
k4rtik: Videos $ youtube-dl -t http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rk62hRBDLGc
Setting language
Rk62hRBDLGc: Downloading video webpage
Rk62hRBDLGc: Downloading video info webpage
Rk62hRBDLGc: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: Reasons_to_love_Ubuntu_12_04_LTS-Rk62hRBDLGc.flv
[download] 100.0% of 5.38M at 204.52k/s ETA 00:00
k4rtik: Videos $
In case, you don’t want to download the highest quality to save some bandwidth and time, youtube-dl offers choice of multiple formats. See its man-page to find out more, I prefer H264 videos at 480p size for youtube which I specify like this:
k4rtik: Videos $ youtube-dl -t -f 18 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02nBaaIoFWU
Setting language
02nBaaIoFWU: Downloading video webpage
02nBaaIoFWU: Downloading video info webpage
02nBaaIoFWU: Extracting video information
[download] Multipath_TCP-02nBaaIoFWU.mp4 has already been downloaded
k4rtik: Videos $
You can also use it for downloading complete playlists off youtube:
k4rtik: Videos $ youtube-dl -f 18 -t http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=128ll4yXUfY&list=PL2E1848DB88958935
Oh, and did I mention… it continues the download if interrupted due to network trouble or some other reason, just specify the same command again.
According to its man page it supports video downloads from other popular video hosting sites like Facebook, Metacafe, Vimeo, Yahoo!, YouTube, blip.tv, video.google.com and many more. Hope you enjoy using it for all your video downloading needs.
Ciao
K4rtik
This article first appeared at http://www.digimantra.com/tutorials/best-tool-for-downloading-youtube-videos-and-playlists/
Jishnu 4:44 PM on July 17, 2012 Permalink |
Here is an alternate browser based solution which I use. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/25105.
Kartik 6:49 PM on July 17, 2012 Permalink |
Yeah, I had installed that script as well. But sometimes I just prefer putting the terminal on work and consider it more reliable in case of failed downloads.
Vijeenrosh P.E 10:30 PM on September 22, 2012 Permalink |
I was beginnig to wonder could a play with wget , curl and some shell scripting can make a script like that
Deepak Malani 2:40 PM on November 20, 2012 Permalink |
Used this. good utility. Wondering if this will need regular updates, as was the case with some earlier youtube downloaders (that I used in Windows). BTW, is youtube okay with people downloading its videos (in its terms & conditions)?
Kartik 3:19 PM on November 20, 2012 Permalink |
This actually gets updated pretty often. The download page currently lists the latest version from October 9 – http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/download.html
My opinion is those are not really Youtube’s videos, they are people’s videos. As long a user doesn’t mind sharing the link of their uploaded video publicly, Youtube shouldn’t exert a problem with downloads. It’s another matter that they want visitors to view videos from their site, so they choose not to provide any explicit download video link. Anyhow, this will slowly change with HTML5 video tag, which comes by default with download video option.
Personal Site 7:33 AM on April 25, 2013 Permalink |
Hello! I know this is somewhat off topic but I was wondering which blog platform
are you using for this site? I’m getting fed up of WordPress because I’ve had problems with hackers and I’m looking at alternatives for another platform. I would be fantastic if you could point me in the direction of a good platform.
Kartik 9:13 AM on April 25, 2013 Permalink |
As you can gather from the url of this site, I am using WordPress itself. Haven’t had any problems of attacks, not atleast on wordpress.com hosting. YMMY on self hosting wordpress.