youtube-dl is an amazing and useful command line utility to download videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and more. This articles is about how to install youtube-dl on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. youtube-dl is written in Python
so it’s also referred to as youtube-dl.py or youtube-dl.exe when compiled on Windows.
Feb 20, 2021 youtube-dl is an exceptional tool for downloading videos from YouTube. If you don't like using the terminal, here are some GUI apps built on top of youtube-dl. Apr 28, 2013 Feb 22, 2013. Download the file for your platform. If you're not sure which to choose, learn more about installing packages. Files for youtubedl, version 2021.6.6. Youtube-dl is an open-source download manager for video and audio from YouTube and over 1000 other video hosting websites. It is released under the Unlicense software license. As of July 2021, youtube-dl is one of the most starred projects on GitHub, with over 98.2k stars. See full list on wikihow.com.
youtube-dl depends on ffmpeg or avconv for video transcoding and audio/video merging. We will install ffmpeg in this tutorial since it can be installed via choco on Windows.
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Ad NoticeI will receive a small commission that helps support this blog at no cost to you.Steps to Install youtube-dl on Windows
- From a privileged command prompt run
- Verify that youtube-dl is installed and check the version.
Steps to Install youtube-dl on Ubuntu Linux
youtube-dl can be installed on most Linux distributions using the built-in package manager (apt, yum, etc).
Steps to Install youtube-dl on Mac OSX
Steps to Install youtube-dl using python/pip
This method assumes you already have python and pip installed
Download a YouTube video using youtube-dl
Lets give it a try by downloading a youtube video from the command line.
Here are the video file’s properties and the downloaded video
What sites can youtube-dl download videos from?
Although the name implies that youtube-dl only works for downloading videos from youtube, I was shocked to discover it supports over 1,000 other websites. Some popular ones include….
- YouTube
- Vimeo
- Twitch
- DailyMotion
- Facebook Videos
- Twitter Videos
References
Users of the extremely popular YouTube-dl YouTube media downloader have flooded GitHub with new repositories containing the tool's source code after GitHub took down the project's repositories on Friday.
YouTube-dl is a command-line program that can be used to download multimedia content from YouTube and several other sites; before being removed, it used GitHub to host source code and compiled executables.
The utility is also used by journalists for various reporting tasks including downloading press releases, videos, and audio transcriptions.
On October 23, 2020, GitHub took down YouTube-dl's repositories due to a DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act) infringement notice filed by Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), an organization that represents the recording industry in the U.S.
Before being removed, YouTube-dl's repo was in the top 40 most starred GitHub repositories with more than 72,000 stars, between Node.js and Kubernetes.
RIAA meet the Streisand effect
When trying to visit the original YouTube-dl GitHub repo or any of the other more than a dozen forks that were removed, you will see a message stating that the 'Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown.'
'We have disabled public access to the repository. The notice has been publicly posted,' the DMCA takedown notice also reads.
While almost everyone was expecting blowback from YouTube-dl's angered users due to the Streisand effect, the number of new repos that showed up on the version control platform has surpassed most people's expectations.
By targeting the project, the RIAA inadvertently exposed the project to a huge amount of new people given that YouTube-dl users and fans took to social media platforms and shared the story with tens of millions of other people.
As shown when doing a quick search for YouTube-dl, GitHub now hosts hundreds of new repositories containing the source code of the YouTube downloader or related to it (when using no search filters, thousands of such repos show up).
GitHub repo now also hosting YouTube-dl's source code
Besides the huge number of new YouTube-dl repos that popped up since October 23, a copy of YouTube-dl's source code was also added to an official GitHub repository used for hosting received DMCA takedown notices.
The user who committed the source code used a bug allowing anyone to attach commits to repos they don't control.
According to security engineer Lance R. Vick, this is a known issue previously reported to GitHub that the company's security team chose to ignore.
Youtube-dl 480p
The problem with YouTube-dl's takedown is that it sets a dangerous precedent when it comes to removing other repositories of software that isn't violating copyright.
Ricardo Garcia, the original creator of YouTube-dl and a former project maintainer (between 2006 and 2011), now part of the ytdl-org group that managed the GitHub repo, told BleepingComputer that he didn't receive any legal threats prior to the takedown.
'I don't have a general statement on the current situation other than a personal opinion that it is indeed unfortunate that the repository is currently blocked,' Garcia said.
'Other people have also expressed this idea much more eloquently than I ever could. See for example the following article by the Freedom of the Press Foundation: https://freedom.press/news/riaa-github-youtube-dl-journalist-tool/.'