-Copyright © 2006-2012 Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez
| youtube-dl | -About the program | -
youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6+ (Python 3 support is planned), and it is not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like. The project is currently being developed at github.
- -| youtube-dl | -Documentation | -
In Windows, once you have installed the Python interpreter, save the program with the .py extension and put it somewhere in the PATH. Try to follow the guide to install youtube-dl under Windows.
- -In Unix, download it, give it execution permission and copy it to one of the PATH directories (typically, /usr/local/bin).
- -After that, you should be able to call it from the command line as youtube-dl or youtube-dl.py. I will use youtube-dl in the following examples. Usage instructions are easy. Use youtube-dl followed by a video URL or identifier. Example: youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobar". The video will be saved to the file foobar.flv in that example. As YouTube.com videos are usually in Flash Video format, their extension should be flv. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of ffmpeg can play them. That includes VLC, MPlayer, etc. Those two work under Windows and other platforms, but you could also get a specific FLV player of your taste.
- -If you try to run the program and you receive an error message containing the keyword SyntaxError near the end, it means your Python interpreter is too old or from the 3.x branch.
- -The program is usually invoked as youtube-dl followed by options and the video URLs. Listing all the options here would make this text too long, so you can run youtube-dl --help and get a summary of them. From that point on you can start experimenting with the different options yourself. The most common ones are -t (or -l) to include the video title in the file name. Also, the -o option can specify the output file name and path. It allows special character sequences that can be used as templates to be replaced. See the "Output template" section for more details.
- -Some YouTube videos are served using Adobe's proprietary RTMP protocol, which imposes DRM restrictions and encrypts the connection. youtube-dl is not able to download these videos by itself. However, it will attempt to use the rtmpdump program, if it's installed in your system, to download these videos.
- -The Frequently Asked Questions page contains answers to some common questions that pop up in my e-mail and in the issue tracker. Be sure to check it before reporting problems.
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-For a complete list, execute youtube-dl --list-extractors.
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youtube-dl supports downloading videos through a proxy, by setting the http_proxy environment variable to the proxy URL, as in http://proxy_machine_name:port/.
Using the -f option and other related options, you can specify the video format to be downloaded from YouTube. Instead of keeping a video format table here, I will refer you to the list of YouTube formats on Wikipedia.
- -The -o option allows users to indicate a template for the output file names. The basic usage is not to set any template arguments when downloading a single file, like in youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "http://some/video". However, it may contain special sequences that will be replaced when downloading each video. The special sequences have the format %(NAME)s. To clarify, that's a percent symbol followed by a name in parenthesis, followed by a lowercase S. Allowed names are:
- -The current default template is %(id)s.%(ext)s, but that will be switchted to %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s (which can be requested with -t at the moment).
In some cases, you don't want special characters such as 中, spaces, or &, such as when transferring the downloaded filename to a Windows system or the filename through an 8bit-unsafe channel. In these cases, add the --restrict-filenames flag to get a shorter title:
$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" BaW_jenozKc
-youtube-dl test video ''_ä↭𝕐.mp4 # All kinds of weird characters
-$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" BaW_jenozKc --restrict-filenames
-youtube-dl_test_video_.mp4 # A simple file name
-You can configure youtube-dl by placing default arguments (such as --extract-audio --no-mtime to always extract the audio and not copy the mtime) into /etc/youtube-dl.conf and/or ~/.local/config/youtube-dl.conf.
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| youtube-dl | -Download Page | -
Note that if you directly click on these hyperlinks, your web browser will most likely display the program contents. It's usually better to right-click on it and choose the appropriate option, normally called Save Target As or Save Link As, depending on the web browser you are using.
- -Remember youtube-dl requires Python version 2.x (x being at least 6) to work.
- -| youtube-dl | -Download Page | -
Note that if you directly click on these hyperlinks, your web browser will most likely display the program contents. It's usually better to right-click on it and choose the appropriate option, normally called Save Target As or Save Link As, depending on the web browser you are using.
- -Remember youtube-dl requires Python version 2.x (x being at least 6) to work.
- -| youtube-dl | -Frequently Asked Questions | -
402 Payment Required when trying to download a video. What's this?Please report the problem in the issuetracker. Your bug report should include:
- -youtube-dl -t "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uHlDtZ6Oc3s&feature=channel_video_title"youtube-dl --version. If you have made any changes, please provide it. In many cases, simply updating (with youtube-dl --update) fixes the problem.python --version. We support Python 2.6, 2.7, and 3.3+.If you're suggesting a feature, any details can help:
- -Most people asking this question are not aware that youtube-dl now defaults to downloading the highest available quality as reported by YouTube, which will be 1080p or 720p in some cases, so you no longer need the -b option. For some specific videos, maybe YouTube does not report them to be available in a specific high quality format you're interested in. In that case, simply request it with the -f option and youtube-dl will try to download it.
- -402 Payment Required when trying to download a video. What's this?Apparently YouTube requires you to pass a CAPTCHA test if you download too much. At this moment, there is no plan to solve this issue, as youtube-dl is a command line program that is many times used without X and in an unattended fashion, so there's no easy way of solving this, in my humble opinion. I have no plans to solve it at this moment, but let me know your ideas and code if you come up with something.
- -If you used youtube-dl to download a video and it wrote the video file to your hard drive, finishing with a completion message of 100%, the video is downloaded, so youtube-dl has finished its job and usually it's not to blame for problems that happen later. Not every video player supports FLV or MP4 files and every codec out there needed to play YouTube videos. In Linux, for example, I am generally pleased with MPlayer. In Windows, I tend to use VLC. Those usually work flawlessly.
- -Due to changes in YouTube, youtube-dl is now forced to provide the final video URL directly instead of the ones it used to provide, which were based on the "get_video" resource. The new URLs are real and work too, but they need to be used in combination with the --cookies option to be useful for external applications. Issue 41 in the issue tracker contains a bit more information about the problem.
youtube has switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. You can update youtube-dl with sudo youtube-dl --update (or python youtube-dl --update).
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youtube requires an additional signature since September 2012 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. You can update youtube-dl with sudo youtube-dl --update (or python youtube-dl --update).
The error
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-File "youtube-dl", line 2
-SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x93' ...
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-means you're using an outdated version of Python. Please update to Python 2.6 or 2.7.
| youtube-dl | -Download videos from YouTube.com - (and mores sites...) | -
youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+), and it is not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.
- -| Documentation |
| Download |
| Support |
| Develop |
| About |
-You can also contact us on the irc channel #youtube-dl(webchat) on freenode. -
- -| Homepage |
| Download instructions |
| Documentation |
| Support |
| Develop |
| About |
| youtube-dl | -Running it under Windows | -
We now provide an experimental Windows build. Simply download it here, copy it to a location of your choosing, and run it in the command line.
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