Download videos from YouTube.com using youtube-dl

This post was written by admin on October 20, 2009
Posted Under: General,Internet

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.x (x being at least 4), and it’s not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. The latest version is 2009.09.13. It’s released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.

Using this command in terminal(Applications/Accessories/Terminal) to install youtube-dl in ubuntu:

sudo aptitude install youtube-dl

Or you can download and get more information from this page.
Now,use this command to learn about youtube-dl’s usage:

man youtube-dl

For example,we want to download video from this URL:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v,and name this video foobar.flv.We use:

youtube-dl -o foobar.flv http://www.youtube.com/watch?v

As YouTube.com videos are in Flash Video format, their extension should be flv. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of ffmpeg can play them.

Related posts:

  1. Two ways to Download videos from Youtube or other video sites in Ubuntu
  2. MediaDownloader – Search and Download Google Image & Youtube Videos
  3. Easy Download and Convert Videos from Youtube,Google Video using CaC
  4. PPA Installing the latest Minitube (Youtube Client) in Ubuntu
  5. Sharing links to videos and watching directly in Pidgin

    Reader Comments

    hi .
    i am trying to download a video from youtube-dl but it is saying that it is INVALID PARAMETER.
    Please tell what to do and how will i resolve this problem.

    [Reply]

    #1 
    Written By ashutosh kumar on July 11th, 2010 @ 6:22 am

    the best video player that i use is none other than VLC Player, it is free and i think it is open source too~-~

    [Reply]

    #2 
    Written By Jacob Johnson on October 6th, 2010 @ 12:45 pm

    $ sudo youtube-dl -U #use it to update youtube-dl
    $ youtube-dl -cit “”

    t to save using the more friendly name, the video title
    c to continue previous downloads
    i to ignore errors
    More? man youtube-dl

    [Reply]

    #3 
    Written By Pablo on July 12th, 2011 @ 3:06 pm

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