Download Youtube videos with "youtube-dl"

There are plenty of download tools available for Youtube videos. But someday or the other they shall disappoint you. They would ask for ransom to keep using, or failing to download every now and then, download would suck; especially for OSX users.

For some time I have been using youtube-dl (which I had mentioned in other post) and it has worked like a charm for me. It is a CLI tool with huge options, right from video/audio quality to downloading only latest videos and what not.

• Here is my bash script to download videos (video or playlist) and save it in ~/DownloadsYT/Videos folder

Usage: youtube-video “Complete video URL”

    ## Filename: youtube-video
    #!/bin/bash

    if [ ! -d ~/DownloadsYT/Videos ]; then
    mkdir -p ~/Downloads/YTVideos
    fi

    cd ~/Downloads/YTVideos || return

    youtube-dl --yes-playlist -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best' --merge-output-format mp4 -o '%(title)s-%(id)s-%(format_id)s.%(ext)s' "$1"

• Similarly to download an mp3, (in ~/Downloads/TYMusic folder)

Usage: youtube-audio “Complete video URL”

    ## Filename: youtube-audio
    #!/bin/bash

    if [ ! -d ~/Downloads/TYMusic ]; then
        mkdir -p ~/Downloads/TYMusic
    fi

    cd ~/Downloads/TYMusic || return


    format=mp3


    youtube-dl --prefer-ffmpeg -f 171/251/140/bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format "$format" --audio-quality 0 "$1"

There has been some GUI version of this utility but I prefer the script version.

Official Site: youtube-dl