YouTube-DL is a command line tool written in Python to help users download videos from YouTube, Dailymotion, Yahoo, Facebook, Flickr, PressTV and many other sites. YouTube-DL is a cross-platform piece of software, it runs on Windows, Linux/Unix, and macOS.
YouTube-DL support download from many sites in different formats, both as a video and audio files. By default, youtube-dl will pick the highest quality but you can obtain low quality if you have a slow internet connection by passing some options.
This tutorial will take you through how to install and use YouTube-DL on Ubuntu 18.04.
Other good features of youtube-dl include:
- Resuming interrupted downloads
- Extracting mp3 from video files
- Downloading all video files from a playlist
- Download only the videos uploaded in the last x days
- Set Maximum download rate
- Embed subtitle into the video while downloading
How to install youtube-dl on Ubuntu
There are three ways to install youtube-dl on Ubuntu 18.04 system. We will consider the installation of youtube-dl from all the three methods:
Install youtube-dl from apt
The first and easy method is installing youtube-dl from apt repository. For this, you just need to run the command:
$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
Install youtube-dl using pip
youtube-dl package can also be installed using pip. First, install packagepython-pip.
$ sudo apt-get install python-pip
Once pip is present on the system, use it to install youtube-dl :
$ sudo pip install youtube-dl
Install youtube-dl from binary
Youtube-dl is also distributed as a binary package which you can download and install it.
sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl hash -r
Any of the three methods should work fine for you.
Update YouTube-DL
You can always update youtube-dl to the latest release using the command below:
$ sudo youtube-dl -U
How to Use youtube-dl
Once you have installed youtube-dl , see below examples of how to download Videos and extract audio with youtube-dl.
Download highest quality video
To download the highest quality of a video from a URL, use the command:
$ youtube-dl example.com/watch?v=id
Check available video formats
YouTube-DL supports a multitude of formats, e.g Mp4, mkv, webm, FLV e.t.c. To list available video codes, use -F option. E.g
$ youtube-dl -F https://youtu.be/FLV1z9BWvyc 18 mp4 640x360 medium , avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2@ 96k, 26.70MiB 43 webm 640x360 medium , vp8.0, vorbis@128k, 30.47MiB 22 mp4 1280x720 hd720 , avc1.64001F, mp4a.40.2@192k (best)
Take note of the format number - 18,43,22. This is used when downloading the video.
Download Specific video format
After getting a list of formats available, download specific format using -f format-number. E.g
$ youtube-dl -f 22 https://youtu.be/FLV1z9BWvyc
This will download format/codec1280x720 hd720.
Download Audio
You can also download audio using youtube-dl like below:
youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 example.com/watch?v=id
This will extract audio from the video and save it to disk.
Download a video playlist
Youtube-dl saves all videos on a playlist by default. Just copy playlist URL and pass it to youtube-dl command line tool.
$ youtube-dl example.com/watch?v=id&list=listid
You can also start from a specified number.
$ youtube-dl --playlist-start 5 example.com/watch?v=id&list=listid
Force resume of partially downloaded files
To force resume of partially downloaded files without overriding completed, use -cwi options:
$ youtube-dl -cwi video-url
Use a proxy server to download files
$ youtube-dl --proxy 127.0.0.1:3128
Download and embed subtitles to a video
Use the option --write-auto-sub to download Video subtitles if available.
$ youtube-dl --write-auto-sub <other-options> <url>
Install Youtube-dl GUI
If you are not a cli-centric person, you can as well install Youtube-dl GUI program for easy download of video files. youtube-dl-gui is a cross-platform front-end GUI of the popular youtube-dl written in wxPython.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8 sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install youtube-dlg
You should be able to launch the tool from cli or Search
Read Also:
YouTube-DL is one of the best, complex and feature-rich tools to download Videos from the list of sites supported. It is fast, cross-platform, with low resource utilization. Give it a try and you'll like it.
I am running Ubuntu 14.04 and was trying to use 'youtube-dl' - but getting lots of error messages. I even removed and reinstalled the package from the repository using the suggested command above "sudo apt-get install youtube-dl".
Using google and after looking at numerous web pages I came across one that suggested that the package should be loaded from the 'yt-dl.org' site directly which would ensure that this would be the latest version:
https://askubuntu.com/questions/791969/error-while-using-youtube-dl
And what a shock I got when I used 'youtube-dl -v' on the two versions!
The linux repository version was 2014.02.17
The 'yt-dl.org' version was 2019.03.09
By the way the latest version seems to work fine under Ubuntu 14.04
I like youtube dl a lot. You really need to really need to keep it updated to prevent an Extractor Error. I found a lot of good GUI apps using it behind the scenes.
Only problems were earlier this year when I upgraded to 19.04... bios takes much longer to boot up as well... and Youtube-DL seems to preprocess but go into Error right after... not always, but most of the time. Is this a 19.04 issue only?
18.04 - "command not found" for using apt or pip
Hi Hines,
Try installing youtube-dl using pip3
$ sudo pip3 install youtube-dl
Have u tried installing from snap store ?
$ sudo snap install youtube-dl