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

  • By
    39 Shirts – Leaving Mozilla

    In 2001 I had just graduated from a small town high school and headed off to a small town college. I found myself in the quaint computer lab where the substandard computers featured two browsers: Internet Explorer and Mozilla. It was this lab where I fell...

  • By
    5 More HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed

    The HTML5 revolution has provided us some awesome JavaScript and HTML APIs.  Some are APIs we knew we've needed for years, others are cutting edge mobile and desktop helpers.  Regardless of API strength or purpose, anything to help us better do our job is a...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Using Opacity to Show Focus with jQuery

    A few days back I debuted a sweet article that made use of MooTools JavaScript and opacity to show focus on a specified element. Here's how to accomplish that feat using jQuery. The jQuery JavaScript There you have it. Opacity is a very simple but effective...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools ElementSpy

    One part of MooTools I love is the ease of implementing events within classes. Just add Events to your Implements array and you can fire events anywhere you want -- these events are extremely helpful. ScrollSpy and many other popular MooTools plugins would...

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!