There are many online softwares which help in downloading videos from sites like YouTube. But with each updates in the YouTube, the softwares doesn’t work well all the time. In this article, I’ll let you know about a program which helps to download YouTube videos with ease and has been working consistently well for quite some time.
youtube-dl is a command line program which helps in downloading videos from sites like YouTube and other online video sites. If you are windows user you can download the executable file and save in your local drive and place the location in the environment variable. You can install the program on an Ubuntu using the following command :
sudo pip install --upgrade youtube-dl
MAC users can make use of Homebrew to install the program.
brew install youtube-dl
Once you have the program installed, all you need to do is launch the command prompt, and type in the following command :
youtube-dl YOUTUBE-VIDEO-URL-TO-DOWNLOAD
And it should download the YouTube video. youtube-dl provides many options to download youtube videos like download a youtube playlist. To download a playlist, all you need to do is append an option specifying the start of the playlist and end of the playlist to download. For example :
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zK3vpobC2GA&list=RDzK3vpobC2GA --playlist-star 1 --playlist-end 3
The above command would download the first three videos from the youtube playlist starting from first video in the playlist. Similarly it provides many other video selection options like max number of downloads, download based on the number of views the video has received, age limit etc. to name a few. Sometimes it happens that you don’t have the bandwidth to download a high quality video, so prefer to download a low size video. youtube-dl provides you with an option to specify the max file size which should be downloaded. Here is how it would look like:
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qi2Onp-yScA --max-filesize 100M
Let me know in the comments below, of any other effective tools to download videos online that you have used. For a detailed info on the options provided by youtube-dl do have a look at the official documentation.