I'm a recent convert to youtube-dl. I use some bash scripts[0] to make youtube-dl even easier. I have a Mac but these should work elsewhere.

Copy the video page URL to your clipboard and just type

yd - download the video. Works on most popular sites with video.

yda - download just audio, best available

ypl - makes a subfolder with the whole playlist in it (Copy the playlist URL)

yc - downloads every video on the channel (Copy the channel URL)

    yd () { youtube-dl "$(pbpaste)" ; }
    yda () { youtube-dl -f bestaudio "$(pbpaste)" ; }
    ypl () { youtube-dl -i -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' "$(pbpaste)" ; }
    yc () { youtube-dl -i -o '%(channel)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s' "$(pbpaste)" ; }

I use especially yd and ypl constantly. Sites where youtube-dl doesn't work, this usually does: Get the master m3u8 or an mp4 link from the page using Developer tools->Network[1], copy link to clipboard, and

vd myfile - downloads the video as myfile.mp4

    vd () { youtube-dl -o "$1.mp4" "$(pbpaste)" ;  }

[0] Save them in your .bash_profile or equivalent on your machine.

[1] i.e. with Network tab open, refresh page and start video playing.

Nice. Thanks for the aliases. I just started using it myself for downloading and transcribing some videos. It works pretty well.

And back on topic youtube-dl uses system ffmpeg for converting youtube's .webm and other weird discrete formats into proper video (or audio) files.

Just a reminder, depending on your installation method of youtube-dl , you may have to manually install ffmpeg globally on your system in order to download/mux highest quality videos.

It should be noted that despite the name it supports a lot of different websites, not just Youtube. It's great to capture hls streams for instance.

And the list is seriously long, too: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/tree/master/youtube_d...

And for good reason Insane amount of customization, and once you finally have pieces together your 10 line command with 40 parameters, you can just give it a huge list of URLs and let it do all the work in the background.

Thanks.