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
    Page Visibility API

    One event that's always been lacking within the document is a signal for when the user is looking at a given tab, or another tab. When does the user switch off our site to look at something else? When do they come back?

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Geolocation API

    One interesting aspect of web development is geolocation; where is your user viewing your website from? You can base your language locale on that data or show certain products in your store based on the user's location. Let's examine how you can...

  • By
    Add Controls to the PHP Calendar

    I showed you how to create a PHP calendar last week. The post was very popular so I wanted to follow it up with another post about how you can add controls to the calendar. After all, you don't want your...

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!