Download Videos with Youtube-DL

YouTube videos can also be downloaded via Windows command with something called youtube-dl. Never really explored this method, I guess because I always found the Firefox plugin VideoDownloader to be more than an enough for me.

 

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCrUGKwc8JA?list=PLWQqrldPh8tLBSTiKIsQwdToUNkl2JrML&w=560&h=315]

 

If you’re not already too familiar with running command terminal the .exe file cannot be loaded by itself. Instead you will have to launch Window’s cmd tool and load up youtube-dl from there. There’s a ton of commands at your disposal and if you wanna pull up a list of them you can do so by either visiting the creator’s readme page or by typing in youtube-dl.exe –help in the prompt. Just make sure that when running Windows CMD you are currently in the directory that youtube-dl.exe is in otherwise your commands won’t work.

 

This would be an excellent way to download a Youtube channel’s entire video collection all in one command rather than visiting every video page. Here’s also a video embed of somebody demonstrating the program.

 

A few helpful commands:

  1. youtube-dl.exe –write-thumbnail https://www.youtube.com/videoID  =  Downloads the thumbnail along with the video
  2. youtube-dl.exe -F https://www.youtube.com/videoID  =  List all the formats available for download
  3. youtube-dl.exe -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/videoID  =  Lowercase f and number tells youtube-dl which format you wanna get
  4. youtube-dl.exe https://www.youtube.com/user/ChannelName/videos  =  Downloads all public videos
  5. youtube-dl.exe –get-thumbnail https://www.youtube.com/videoID  =  Gives Thumbnail URL
  6. youtube-dl.exe –help  =  List of commands & other info
  7. ctrl+c  =  Cancels Download

 

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