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youtube-dl

warning

There hasn't been a release since 2021. The Homebrew page says it's deprecated:

The current youtube-dl version has many unresolved issues. Upstream have not tagged a new release since 2021. Please use yt-dlp instead.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl

youtube-dl <URL>

youtube-dl --write-description --write-auto-sub --sub-lang es <URL>

List subtitles: youtube-dl --list-subs <URL>

Use --skip-download if you want to get the subtitles or description only.

Video format​

  • Use --list-formats to get the 'format code', a number like 139 or 251. Eg to list a YouTube video formats do: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isd5zPzuM --list-formats.
  • Once you have the 'format code' you can do: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isd5zPzuM -f 244.
  • Make sure to not pick a 'video only' format otherwise you don't get any audio :/

Quality​

Example: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioEAR_zPzuM -f 'bestvideo[width<=1200]+bestaudio'

Download audio​

youtube-dl -x [--audio-quality 0] [--audio-format "flac"] <URL>

  • --audio-quality QUALITY: 0 is the best, 9 the worst
  • --audio-format FORMAT: "best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", "vorbis", or "wav"; "best" by default

Also see https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp