Command-line: youtube-dl

One of the archivists' best friends. At least you don't have to go to those shady YouTube conversion sites anymore when you have a complete list of other video sites you can download from.

Take note, I use yt-dlp. Any yt-dlp-specific options should be in the appropriate note.

For complete information, you can always inspect youtube-dl.1 manual page.

Synopsis

youtube-dl [OPTIONS...] [URLS...]

Options

• --add-metadata adds metadata to the resulting file after download

• --audio-format EXTENSION downloads the video with the select format of "opus", "mp3", "opus", and "vorbis"; but there is also the convenient "best" option

• --audio-quality QUALITY sets the quality of the audio from 0 to 9, best to worst respectively; bitrates are also accepted (e.g., 320K, 1M)

• --date RANGE finds videos that are uploaded from a certain date range. See the Date ranges section to see the format required.

• --dateafter RANGE and --datebefore RANGE is a similar option to --date but to find videos before or after the specified date range, respectively. Accepts the same format as --date.

• --list-extractors prints a list of supported sites and their specific features.

• --format QUALITY downloads the video with the format shown in --list-format; there are convenient options such as bestaudio and bestvideo referring to the best quality it could find

• -o, --output STRING formats the resulting filename of the tracks to be downloaded

• --no-overwrite throws an error if the file already exists which is handy for scripts

• -x, --extract-audio extracts only the audio track

Output formats

For --output option, there are a lot of things to consider naming your files. You may want to automate them yourself but youtube-dl has plenty of options from the get-go.

The following code is the sensible default output string.

%(playlist_index)02d-%(title)s.%(ext)s

A few of the usual stuff I use:

• title (string) is the title of the track

• ext (string) is the extension to be used; pretty much recommended to use it

• creator (string) and uploader (string)

A lot of the things I have to do is to download multiple tracks from an album or playlist. Unfortunately, these are often different from one site to another.

• playlist_index (number) indicates the position of the track in a playlist. These are usually used from YouTube and Soundcloud playlists.

• track_number (number) is the position of the track from an album. Usually, these are used from Bandcamp and Vimeo playlists.

Date ranges

The options --date and the like accept a certain format for date ranges in (now|today)[-|+][\\d+](day|week|month|year)s? or YYYYMMDD for absolute date.

Examples

Here is an entryway into your newfound archiving habit. Enjoy! :)

Download the thumbnail and the audio of the video

Very simple. Very useful as most of the thumbnails can go to high resolution and if you need them for some reason.

youtube-dl --write-thumbnail --extract-audio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy9VvdaLuSs

Download an entire album

Though, you should look at the supported sites if it supports downloading an album out of the URL. In this example, we have Bandcamp.

youtube-dl --output '%(track_number)02d-%(title)s.%(ext)s' --format bestaudio https://gametal.bandcamp.com/album/side-quests-vol-3

Specific video download requirements

In this example, I want to download a video with a width of 1080px and the best video and audio at 320Kbit/s. Oh, and the video should be in MP4 and the audio in Opus.

This is will only succeed if the format is available to download which you can do with --list-format.

youtube-dl --format 'bestvideo[width=1080,ext=mp4]+bestaudio[abr=320K,ext=opus]' https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wy9VvdaLuSs

Check the first 50 videos at certain date range

In this example, I want to download videos from roam:David Revoy's YouTube channel that uploaded up to 2 months ago while checking only the first 50 videos. This is a useful template especially if the channel has a large selection of videos. Also useful if you're checking for videos daily to mitigate against potential bans from overusing it.

youtube-dl --playlist-end 50 --dateafter 'today-2weeks' "https://www.youtube.com/c/DavidRevoy"