Good Day my fellow Linux Yogi’s,
Did you ever wonder if it is possible to download your favorite youtube video down to your computer? Don’t look any further with this little program youtube-dl you can easily do it.
Before we get started as usual we should bring our system to an up to date state. Run “sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade”
Now that our system is up to date we can go ahead and add a new source to our repository.
The source will be added and automatically a public will be downloaded and installed as well to ensure that the source is legit.
Now that the new source is successful added to our system we need to run the repository update again.
We are up to date and there is nothing in the way to installed youtube-dl. Run the command as illustrated in the screenshot.
After the installation I recommend to run the youtube-dl update just to ensure that we are updated and therefore able to download the latest youtube videos. You should run this command periodically so you avoid running into issues.
Now we are updated and we can run our first download. Youtube-dl has a lot of command line switches which can be displayed by issuing the command “man youtube-dl” but for this article I show you three switches that get the job done nicely. We are looking at switch “c“, “i” & “t“.
Switch “c”: Forces to resume of partially downloaded files
Switch “i”: Continues on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist
Switch “t”: Uses title in the filename
You can use either single video URL’s or playlist URL’s to download with youtube-dl.
A regular video URL looks like this for example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qfwxiByHZiw
where as a playlist looks like this:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRebca09UnH9nrlVI6hA0NRSu_OqrLUQ9
Let’s get started by downloading our first video.
I hope that this article was of some use to you. Please register and comment on my articles and if you like to know something use the contact form and request an article.
Until next time my friends, Namaste! 😉