Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

How to Download a YouTube Video or Channel

By  on  

The ability to download media on the internet almost feels like a lost art. When I was in my teens, piracy of mp3s, movies, and just about everything else via torrents and apps like Kazaa, LimeWire, Napster, etc. was in full swing. These days sites use blob URLs and other means to prevent downloads. Luckily we have tools like yt-dlp to download individual YouTube videos or entire channels of content.

To download an entire channel, you can use yt-dlp:

yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/@beetlejuicearchives3490

If you're like me and only care for the audio, you can use a few more arguments:

yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/@beetlejuicearchives3490

youtube-dl used to be the standard for downloading YouTube videos but yt-dlp seems to have taken the throne. YouTube has such a wealth of information on just about anything, be sure to download content for travel, long walks, or any other reason!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

  • By
    From Webcam to Animated GIF: the Secret Behind chat.meatspac.es!

    My team mate Edna Piranha is not only an awesome hacker; she's also a fantastic philosopher! Communication and online interactions is a subject that has kept her mind busy for a long time, and it has also resulted in a bunch of interesting experimental projects...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Create a Photo Stack Effect with Pure CSS Animations or MooTools

    My favorite technological piece of Google Plus is its image upload and display handling.  You can drag the images from your OS right into a browser's DIV element, the images upload right before your eyes, and the albums page displays a sexy photo deck animation...

  • By
    MooTools Gone Wild: Element Flashing

    If you're like me and lay awake in bed at night, you've flipped on the TV and seen the commercials: misguided, attention-starved college girls fueled by alcohol ruining their futures by flashing lame camera-men on Spring Break. Why do they do it? Attention...

Discussion

  1. HALWIN

    This is super helpful, David! I’ve used youtube-dl in the past but didn’t realize yt-dlp had become the go-to tool now. The examples you shared make it really easy to follow, especially the audio-only option for mp3 downloads. I also appreciate the bit of nostalgia you added about the old Napster/Kazaa days — it really puts things into perspective on how far media access has come. Looking forward to trying yt-dlp for organizing my own offline playlists!

  2. kartofelek007

    And you can download a few videos at once.

    1) in the same folder where you have yt-dlp.exe create file for example list.txt where you put urls to videos:

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nXeEQ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=.....

    2) save, then run this command:

    ./yt-dlp.exe -a list.txt -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!