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
    9 Mind-Blowing WebGL Demos

    As much as developers now loathe Flash, we're still playing a bit of catch up to natively duplicate the animation capabilities that Adobe's old technology provided us.  Of course we have canvas, an awesome technology, one which I highlighted 9 mind-blowing demos.  Another technology available...

  • By
    Camera and Video Control with HTML5

    Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs.  Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop.  One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Custom Scrollbars in WebKit

    Before each of the browser vendors we like was providing unique CSS controls, Internet Explorer was setting the tone.  One such example is IE's early implementation of CSS filters. Internet Explorer was also the first browser that allowed developers to, for better or worse, customize...

  • By
    Animated AJAX Record Deletion Using MooTools

    I'm a huge fan of WordPress' method of individual article deletion. You click the delete link, the menu item animates red, and the item disappears. Here's how to achieve that functionality with MooTools JavaScript. The PHP - Content & Header The following snippet goes at the...

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!