yt-dlp.md from HariSekhon/Knowledge-Base repo: https://github.com/HariSekhon/Knowledge-Base

yt-dlp.md

YouTube Downloader

yt-dlp/yt-dlp

• Summary
• Website
• Install
• Download Single Video
• Download Video Not Inferred from Web Page
• Download All Videos from YouTube Channel
• Stacher7 - GUI for yt-dlp

Summary

Open source YouTube Downloader can download both video and audio from not just YouTube but many other social media sites including Facebook, Twitter / X etc.

Website

If you don't want to run the open source command line version, you can try this website:

https://ytdlp.online/

Install

Install yt-dlp to download, and ffmpeg for conversions:

brew install yt-dlp ffmpeg

There's a long list of extractors for different sites:

yt-dlp --list-extractors

but it even works on even sites for which there aren't special extractors.

Show available download formats:

yt-dlp -F "$url"

You can then choose the format quality you want:

yt-dlp -f "$format_id" "$url"

If you get an error like this:

ERROR: [youtube] ...: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot.

You can add this switch with your browser to use its cookies:

--cookies-from-browser chrome

Download Single Video

Use script from DevOps-Bash-tools repo to simplify downloading with maximum quality and compatibility, with continue and no overwrite settings.

This script has symlinks for X/Twitter and Facebook too as it can download from those sites and should also work for all those listed by the above command of yt-dlp --list-extractors:

youtube_download_video.sh "$url"

These are just symlinks for convenience:

x_download_video.sh "$url"

twitter_download_video.sh "$url"

facebook_download_video.sh "$url"

The script will even attempt to install yt-dlp and ffmpeg prerequisites if not already installed.

If you get an error like this:

ERROR: [youtube] ...: Sign in to confirm you’re not a bot.

then export this:

export YT_DLP_COOKIES_FROM_BROWSER=chrome

and re-run the script, which will then use the switch --cookies-from-browser chrome.

Download Video Not Inferred from Web Page

The yt-dlp tool works really well for extracting the video from many different web pages, but if it fails to parse the page, there is a workaround:

1. Open Chrome Developer Tools or similar network request tracing
2. Click to play the video
3. Record the m3u8 url from the Network section
4. Pass the m3u8 url to the script - since yt-dlp will infer the filename from the m3u8 filename, you'll likely want to pass a second argument to the script for the real filename eg. Some Video.mp4

youtube_download_video.sh "https://.../index.m3u8" "Some Video.mp4"

Download All Videos from YouTube Channel

Using DevOps-Bash-tools repo:

youtube_download_channel.sh "$url"

Stacher7 - GUI for yt-dlp

https://stacher.io/