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Azraf TaohidA.T.

Quick-start on yt-dlp

3 min read

Introduction

The yt-dlp is a command-line tool that let’s you download videos from thousands of websites, including YouTube. The following is a quickstart on how to download, install, and use this tool in a consistent manner.

Setup and installation

The fastest way to start using yt-dlp is to download their binaries from their GitHub release page. Depending on your Operating System,

  • For Linux/Ubuntu: use the yt-dlp file
  • For Windows: use the yt-dlp.exe file

Ubuntu

Once downloaded, the the file somewhere recognized by your system $PATH variable. E.g., on Ubuntu, put it on $HOME/bin folder; this folder is usually appended to your $PATH variable by default (check by running echo $HOME, or open the $HOME/.profile file).

Then make the file executable by running:

chmod +x /path/to/yt-dlp

Important

For various tasks, yt-dlp depends on ffmpeg and ffprobe. And there are some bugs that prevents yt-dlp to work correctly when using their official builds. For this, it is highly recommended to grab them from yt-dlp’s custom build of those packages from here.

Windows

Similar to Ubuntu, the .exe binary file must be placed somewhere recognized by your system’s PATH variable. Unlike Ubuntu, there’s no go-to directory here. What I do is, I put the path %USERPROFILE%\.local\bin into PATH variable, and then place all my scripts there.

To do so:

  1. Create the directory: %USERPROFILE%\.local\bin.
  2. Press CTRL + PAUSE, then click on Advanced system settings, and then Environmental Variables.
  3. Edit the Path user variable to include %USERPROFILE%\.local\bin.
  4. Now place the previously downloaded yt-dlp.exe file into that directory.

Ensure setup is complete by running:

yt-dlp --version

Usage

Using yt-dlp is as simple as running:

yt-dlp <url>

The above works just fine. However, we sometimes might want to have the video in certain format or with certain resolution. That’s where additional flags comes in. The below command download videos from the given URL with best quality up-to 1080p, in MKV format, and also keeps the video URL and video description in separate files:

yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best" --write-link --write-description --embed-thumbnail --embed-metadata --embed-subs --remux-video mkv --no-overwrites --cookies "$HOME/.config/yt-dlp/cookies.txt" --path "/path/to/download/folder" --output "./%(extractor)s/%(uploader_id)s (%(uploader)s)/%(title)s.%(ext)s"

The above was configured to work best with my setup, you should modify to adjust to your use-cases.

Notice

Notice that I’ve provided a --cookies flag with the command. This is because some sites and private videos require the client environment to be signed in before granting access (e.g., X (formerly Twitter)). For those cases, cookies were extracted using Get cookies.txt LOCALLY chromium extension. Learn more here.

Make it consistent

This isn’t convenient to write this long command every-time one might want to download something with this tool. This is where aliases comes in. On Ubuntu, this is as easy as appending the following into the $HOME/.bash_aliases file:

alias dl='yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best" --write-link --write-description --embed-thumbnail --embed-metadata --embed-subs --remux-video mkv --no-overwrites --cookies "$HOME/.config/yt-dlp/cookies.txt" --path "/path/to/download/folder" --output "./%(extractor)s/%(uploader_id)s (%(uploader)s)/%(title)s.%(ext)s"'

Similar effect can be achieved in Windows by creating a dl.bat file into the previously created %USERPROFILE%/.local/bin directory with the content:

@echo off
yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best" --write-link --write-description --embed-thumbnail --embed-metadata --embed-subs --remux-video mkv --no-overwrites --cookies "/yt-dlp/cookies.txt" --path "/path/to/download/folder" --output "./(uploader_id)s ((title)s.%%(ext)s" %*

Now, to download videos from a URL, simply run:

dl <url>