Download youtube videos using youtube-dl

by Pete Houston

I personally don’t like any GUI apps to download Youtube, since I work with terminal most of the times, I found the command-line tool “youtube-dl” is pretty much handy and useful.

For installation instruction and other details information, please refer to the main readme page.

Some useful and regular commands to use with “youtube-dl”.

Download a youtube video

$ youtube-dl {VIDEO_URL}

List all video qualities

$ youtube-dl -F {VIDEO_URL}

Download video with a selected quality

$ youtube-dl -f 22 {VIDEO_URL}

Note: “22” is the format code listed on video quality list.

Download audio only

$ youtube-dl --extract-audio {VIDEO_URL}

Download mp3 audio format

$ youtube-dl —-extract-audio --audio-format mp3 {VIDEO_URL}

Retrieve video information in JSON format without downloading

$ youtube-dl --skip-download -j {VIDEO_URL}

List all video thumbnails information

$ youtube-dl --skip-download --list-thumbnails {VIDEO_URL}

Have fun youtube-dl-ing ☺