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
    Create Namespaced Classes with MooTools

    MooTools has always gotten a bit of grief for not inherently using and standardizing namespaced-based JavaScript classes like the Dojo Toolkit does.  Many developers create their classes as globals which is generally frowned up.  I mostly disagree with that stance, but each to their own.  In any event...

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    HTML5’s placeholder Attribute

    HTML5 has introduced many features to the browser;  some HTML-based, some in the form of JavaScript APIs, but all of them useful.  One of my favorites if the introduction of the placeholder attribute to INPUT elements.  The placeholder attribute shows text in a field until the...

  • By
    Dijit’s TabContainer Layout: Easy Tabbed Content

    One of Dojo's major advantages over other JavaScript toolkits is its Dijit library.  Dijit is a UI framework comprised of JavaScript widget classes, CSS files, and HTML templates.  One very useful layout class is the TabContainer.  TabContainer allows you to quickly create a tabbed content...

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!