youtube-dl - ArchWiki

# youtube-dl

From ArchWiki

Related articles

- mpv
- FFmpeg

youtube-dl is a command-line program that lets you easily download videos and audio from more than a thousand websites. See the list of supported sites.

## Installation

Install the youtube-dl package, or youtube-dl-gitAUR for the development version. It is recommended to also install ffmpeg as it is used for muxing for some sites.

## Usage

See youtube-dl(1).

    $ youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL

Tip: In some cases (like YouTube) URL can be substituted with the video ID.

### Format selection

In cases where multiple formats of a video are available, youtube-dl will download the best ones by default.

To select a specific one to download, first get a list of the available formats:

    $ youtube-dl -F URL

Note the code of the format you want, then run:

    $ youtube-dl -f format URL

### Extract audio

Use `-x` for audio-only downloads (requires FFmpeg).

    $ youtube-dl -x -f bestaudio URL

## Configuration

The system-wide configuration file is `/etc/youtube-dl.conf` and the user-specific configuration file is `~/.config/youtube-dl/config`. The syntax is simply one command-line option per line. Example configuration:

    ~/.config/youtube-dl/config

    # Save in ~/Videos
    -o ~/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s

    # Prefer 1080p or lower resolutions
    -f (bestvideo[height<=1080]/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]/best

See [1] for more information.

## Tips and tricks

### Faster downloads

Some websites throttle transfer speeds. You can often get around this by using Aria2, an external downloader which supports multi-connection downloads. For example:

    $ youtube-dl --external-downloader aria2c --external-downloader-args '-c -j 3 -x 3 -s 3 -k 1M' URL

### Trim (partial download)

Parts of videos can be downloaded by using the output of `youtube-dl -g -f format URL` as ffmpeg input with the `-ss`, `-t` and `-c copy` options.

### URL from clipboard

A shell alias or a keyboard shortcut can be set to download a video (or audio) of a selected (or copied) URL by outputting it from the X selection. See Clipboard#Tools.

## See also

- GitHub repository for documentation.

Categories:

- Download utilities
- Streaming