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

Download YouTube Videos with youtube-dl

By  on  

When preparing for the 8 hour flights to and from London, I knew I couldn't just code the whole time -- I needed some decent entertainment.  One source of free, excellent entertainment is YouTube, but I had no desire to pay for internet on the flight.  With all of this in mind, I installed youtube-dl -- a utility for downloading YouTube videos to your local drive.

To install youtube-dl, run the following from command line:

brew install youtube-dl

With youtube-dl available, simply run the utility with a URL:

# Download a video!
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bS5P_LAqiVg

# Download a video as audio
youtube-dl -x https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--HaFAtC17U

Executing that will download the given YouTube video to your machine.  youtube-dl has more capabilities than just downloading videos such as: thumbnail retrieval, conversion to mp3 or other formats (assuming you have ffmpeg available), logging in, getting subtitles, and more.

Grab youtube-dl if you're looking for music or video from YouTube -- it's the best application available to do the job!

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

Recent Features

Incredible Demos

  • By
    CSS Fixed Position Background Image

    Backgrounds have become an integral part of creating a web 2.0-esque website since gradients have become all the rage. If you think gradient backgrounds are too cliche, maybe a fixed position background would work for you? It does provide a neat inherent effect by...

  • By
    Flexbox Equal Height Columns

    Flexbox was supposed to be the pot of gold at the long, long rainbow of insufficient CSS layout techniques.  And the only disappointment I've experienced with flexbox is that browser vendors took so long to implement it.  I can't also claim to have pushed flexbox's limits, but...

Discussion

  1. RoseHosting

    youtube-dl is the best tool to download audio and video from YouTube. Ubuntu users can install youtube-dl with: 

    sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
  2. brandon

    is there a way to choose which quality you’ll be downloading?

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