Installation

To install youtube-dl I recommend installing it in your global python (2 or 3) package list using pip. Please read my previous article

to see how you should install and use Python 2 or 3 on Windows. Following the instructions from there, you can do the following to install youtube-dl in your global Python 3 packages:

py -3 -m pip install youtube-dl

To run youtube-dl you’ll write something like py -3 -m youtube_dl url_or_video_id (notice the underscore instead of dash since dashes are not supported in module names in python). For example try something like this py -3 -m youtube_dl YgtL4S7Hrwo and you’ll be rewarded with the 2016 Pycon talk from Guido van Rossum! If you find this a little too much too type don’t be afraid, I will give some hints later about how to improve this.

To upgrade your youtube-dl installation you should do something like this:

py -3 -m pip install -U youtube-dl

Notice that you must frequently upgrade your youtube-dl installation because sometimes youtube changes the requirements for viewing / downloading videos and your old version will not work. So if for some reason something is not correct when you use youtube-dl always try updating first.

If you wanted you could also create a virtual environment (see instructions on previously mentioned article) and install youtube-dl locally there using pip install youtube-dl however I prefer to install it on the global packages to be really easy for me to call it from a command prompt I open. Notice that if you install youtube-dl in a virtualenv, after you activate that virtualenv you’ll be able to run it just by typing youtube-dl.

Finally, If for some reason you don’t want want to mess with python and all this (or it just seems greek to you) then you may go on and directly download a youtube-dl windows executable. Just put it in your path and you should be good to go.

To install ffmpeg, I recommend downloading the Windows build from here (select the correct Windows architecture of your system and always static linking - the version doesn’t matter). This will get you a zip - we are mainly interested to the three files under the bin folder of that zip which should be copied to a directory under your path:

• ffmpeg is the passepartout video converting toot that we are going to use
• ffprobe will print some information about a file (about its container and video/audio streams)
• ffplay will play the file — not really recommended there are better tools but it is invaluable for testing; if it can be played be ffplay then ffmpeg will be able to properly read your file

Notice I recommend copying things to a directory in your path. This is recommended and will save you from repeatedly typing the same things over and over. Also, later I will propose a bunch of DOS batch (.bat) files that can also be copied to that directory and help you even more in you youtube video downloading. To add a directory to the PATH, just press Windows+Pause Break, Advanced System Settings, Advanced, Environment Variables, edit the “Path” User variable (for your user) and append the directory there.

Using youtube-dl

As I’ve already explained before, to run youtube-dl you’ll either write something like py -3 -m youtube_dl (if you’ve installed it to your global python packages) or run youtube-dl if you’ve downloaded the pre-built exe or have installed it in a virtualenv. To save you from some keystrokes, you can create a batch file that will run and pass any more parameters to it, something like this:

py -3 -m youtube_dl %*

(the %* will capture the remaining command line) so to get the previous video just run getvideo YgtL4S7Hrwo (or getvideo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YgtL4S7Hrwo - works the same with the video id or the complete url).

One thing I’d like to mention here is that youtube-dl works fine with playlists and even channels. For example, to download all videos from PyCon 2017 just do this:

getvideo https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrJhliKNQ8g0qoE_zvL8eVg/feed and you should see something like:

E:\>py -3 -m youtube_dl https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCrJhliKNQ8g0qoE_zvL8eVg/feed
[youtube:channel] UCrJhliKNQ8g0qoE_zvL8eVg: Downloading channel page
[youtube:playlist] UUrJhliKNQ8g0qoE_zvL8eVg: Downloading webpage
[download] Downloading playlist: Uploads from PyCon 2017
[youtube:playlist] UUrJhliKNQ8g0qoE_zvL8eVg: Downloading page #1
[youtube:playlist] playlist Uploads from PyCon 2017: Downloading 143 videos
[download] Downloading video 1 of 143
[youtube] AjFfsOA7AQI: Downloading webpage
[youtube] AjFfsOA7AQI: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] AjFfsOA7AQI: Extracting video information
WARNING: Requested formats are incompatible for merge and will be merged into mkv.
[download] Destination: Final remarks and conference close  - Pycon 2017-AjFfsOA7AQI.f137.mp4
[download]   2.9% of 34.49MiB at 940.52KiB/s ETA 00:36

This is gonna take some time …

Now, youtube-dl has many options and can be configured with default values depending on your requirements. I won’t go into detail about these except on some things I usually use, if you need some help feel free to ask me.

When you download a video, youtube-dl will try to download the best quality possible for that video, however a video may have various different formats that can be queries by passing the option --list-formats to ffmpeg, for example here’s the output from the previously mentioned video:

E:\>getvideo YgtL4S7Hrwo --list-formats
[youtube] YgtL4S7Hrwo: Downloading webpage
[youtube] YgtL4S7Hrwo: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] YgtL4S7Hrwo: Extracting video information
[info] Available formats for YgtL4S7Hrwo:
format code  extension  resolution note
249          webm       audio only DASH audio   53k , opus @ 50k, 15.14MiB
250          webm       audio only DASH audio   72k , opus @ 70k, 20.29MiB
171          webm       audio only DASH audio  111k , vorbis@128k, 29.42MiB
140          m4a        audio only DASH audio  130k , m4a_dash container, mp4a.40.2@128k, 38.38MiB
251          webm       audio only DASH audio  130k , opus @160k, 36.94MiB
278          webm       256x144    144p   58k , webm container, vp9, 30fps, video only, 11.01MiB
242          webm       426x240    240p   88k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 12.40MiB
160          mp4        256x144    144p  120k , avc1.4d400c, 30fps, video only, 33.64MiB
243          webm       640x360    360p  153k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 23.48MiB
134          mp4        640x360    360p  230k , avc1.4d401e, 30fps, video only, 28.91MiB
133          mp4        426x240    240p  260k , avc1.4d4015, 30fps, video only, 74.75MiB
244          webm       854x480    480p  289k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 39.31MiB
135          mp4        854x480    480p  488k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 56.43MiB
247          webm       1280x720   720p  945k , vp9, 30fps, video only, 102.45MiB
136          mp4        1280x720   720p 1074k , avc1.4d401f, 30fps, video only, 116.72MiB
17           3gp        176x144    small , mp4v.20.3, mp4a.40.2@ 24k
36           3gp        320x180    small , mp4v.20.3, mp4a.40.2
43           webm       640x360    medium , vp8.0, vorbis@128k
18           mp4        640x360    medium , avc1.42001E, mp4a.40.2@ 96k
22           mp4        1280x720   hd720 , avc1.64001F, mp4a.40.2@192k (best)

As you can see, each has an id and defines an extension (container) and info about its video and audio stream. You can download a specific format by using the -f command line otpion. For example , to download the audio-only format with the worst audio quality use C:\Users\serafeim>getvideo YgtL4S7Hrwo -f 249. Notice that there are formats with audio ony and other formats with vide only. To download the worst format possible (resulting in the smallest file size of course ) you can pass the -f worst command line (there’s also a -f best command line which is used by default).

Another thing I’d like to point out here is that you can define an output template using the -o option that will format the name of the output file of your video using the provided options. There are many examples in the docs so I won’t go into any more details here.

Another cool option is the -a that will help you download all videos from a file. For example, if you have a file named videos.txt with the following contsnts:

AjFfsOA7AQI
3dDtACSYVx0
G17E4Muylis

running getvideo -a videos.txt -f worst

will get you all three videos in their worst quality. If you don’t want to create files then you can use something like this:

for %i in (AjFfsOA7AQI 3dDtACSYVx0 G17E4Muylis) do getvideo %i -f worst

and it will run getvideo for all three files.

Some more options I’d like to recommend using are:

• --restrict-filenames to avoid strange filenames
• --ignore-errors to ignore errors when download multiple files (from a playlist or a channel) - this is really useful because if you have a play with missing items youtube-dl will stop downloading the remaining files when it encounters the missing one

If you want to always use these options you may add them to your configuration file (C:\Users\<user name>\youtube-dl.conf) or to the getvideo.bat defined above i.e getvideo.bat will be:

py -3 -m youtube_dl --restrict-filenames --ignore-errors %*

Extracting mp3s

The next step in this trip is to understand how to extract mp3s from videos that are downloaded from youtube. If you’ve payed attention you’d know that by now you can download audio-only formats from youtube - however they are in a format called DASH which most probably is not playable by your car stereo (DASH is specialized for streaming audio through HTTP).

Thus, the proper way to get mp3s is to post-process the downloaded file using ffmpeg to convert it to mp3. This could be done manually (by doing something ffmpeg -i input out.mp3 — ffmpeg is smart enough to know how to convert per extension) but thankfully youtube-dl offers the -x (and friend) parameters to make this automatic. Using -x tells youtube-dl to extract the audio from the video (notice that youtube-dl is smart enough to download one of the audio-only formats so you don’t have ). Using -x alone may result in a different audio format (for example .ogg) so to force conversion to mp3 you should also add the --audio-format mp3 parameter. Thus, to download an mp3 you can use the following command line (continuing from the previous examples):

py -3 -m youtube_dl --restrict-filenames --ignore-errors -x --audio-format mp3  AjFfsOA7AQI

or even better, create a getmp3.bat batch file that will be used to retrieve an mp3:

py -3 -m youtube_dl --restrict-filenames --ignore-errors -x --audio-format mp3 %1

Please notice that also in this case youtube-dl is smart enough to download an audio-only format thus you won’t need to select it by hand using -f to save bandwith.

Splitting the mp3 file to parts

Some people would like to split their large mp3 files to same-length segments. Of course it would be better for the file to be split by silence to individual songs (if the file contains songs) but these methods usually don’t work that good so I prefer the same length segments. To do that using ffmpeg you just need to add the following parameters:

ffmpeg -i input.mp3 -segment_time 180 -f segment out.%03d.mp3"

The segment time is in seconds (so each segment will be 3 minutes) while the output files will have a name like out.001.mp3, out.002.mp3 etc.

What if you’d like to make the segmentation automatic? For this, I recommend writing a batch file with two commands - one to download the mp3 and a second one to call ffmpeg to segment the file. Notice that you could use the --postprocessor-args ARGS command line parameter to pass the required arguments to youtube-dl so it will be done in one command however I’d like to have a little more control thus I prefer two commands (if you decide to use --postprocessor-args ARGS keep in mind that args must be inside double quotes “”).

Since we are going to use two commands, we need to feed the output file of youtube-dl to ffmpeg and specify a name for the ffmpeg output file-segments. The easiest way to do that is to just pass two parameters to the batch file - one for the video to download and one for its name. Copy the following to a file named getmp3seg.bat:

py -3 -m youtube_dl %1 -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 128k -o %2.%%(ext)s"
ffmpeg -i %2.mp3 -segment_time 180 -f segment %2.%%03d.mp3
del %2.mp3

You can then call it like this: getmp3seg AjFfsOA7AQI test. The first line will download and covert the video to mp3 and put it in a file named test.mp3 (the %2 is the test, the %% is used to escape the % and the %(ext)s is the extensions - this is needed if you use something like -o %2.mp3 youtube-dl will be confused when trying to convert the file to mp3 and will not work). The 2nd line will segment the file to 180 second seconds (notice that here also we need to escape %) and the third line will delete the original mp3. This leaves us with the following 4 files (the video was around 10 minutes): test.000.mp3, test.001.mp3, test.002.mp3, test.003.mp3.

One final thing I’d like to present here is a (more complex) script that you can use to download a video and segmentize it only if it is more than 360 seconds. For this, we will also use the mp3info util which can be downloaded directly from the homepage and copied to the path. So copy the following to a script named getmp3seg2.bat:

@echo off

IF "%2"=="" GOTO HAVE_1

py -3 -m youtube_dl %1 -x --audio-format mp3 -o %2.%%(ext)s"

FOR /f %%i IN ('mp3info -p "%%S" %2.mp3') DO SET koko=%%i

IF %koko%  GTR 360 (
        ECHO greater than or equal to 360
        ffmpeg -i %2.mp3 -segment_time 180 -f segment %2.%%03d.mp3
        del %2.mp3
)  else (
   ECHO less than 360
)

GOTO :eof

:HAVE_1
ECHO Please call this file with video id and title

This is a little more complex - I’ll explain it quickly: @echo off is used to suppress non needed output. The IF following makes sure that you have two parameters. The next line downloads the file and converts it to mp3. The FOR loop is a little strange but it’s result will be to retrieve the output of mp3info -o "%S" title.mp3 (which is the duration in seconds of that mp3) and assign it to the koko variable. The next IF checks if koko is greater than (GTR) 360 seconds and if yes will run the conversion code we discussed before - else it will just output that it is less than 360 seconds.

Finally, there’s a GOTO: eof line to skip printing the error message when the batch is called with less than two parameters.

Using youtube-dl from python

Integrating with youtube-dl from python is easy. Of course, you could just go on and directly call the command line however you can have more control. The most important class is youtube_dl.YoutubeDL.YoutubeDL. You instantiate an object of this class class passing the parameters you’d like and call its download() instance method passing a list of urls. Here’s a small script that downloads the input video ids:

import sys
from youtube_dl import YoutubeDL

if __name__ == '__main__':
    if len(sys.argv) > 1:
        ydl_opts = {}
        ydl = YoutubeDL(ydl_opts)
        ydl.download(sys.argv[1:])
    else:
        print("Enter list of urls to download")
        exit(0)

Save it in a file named getvideo.py and run it like py -3 getvideo.py AjFfsOA7AQI 3dDtACSYVx0 G17E4Muylis to download all three videos!

Fixing your unicode names

The last thing I’d like to talk about concerns people that want to download videos with Unicode characters in their titles (for example Greek).

Let’s suppose that you want to download the file vFVNOaUPRow which is piano music from a well-know greek composer. If you get it without parameters (for example py -3 -m youtube_dl -x --audio-format mp3 vFVNOaUPRow) you’ll get the following output file: Ο Μάνος Χατζιδάκις. παίζει 11 κομμάτια στο πιάνο-vFVNOaUPRow.f247.mp3 (notice the greek characters) while, if you add the --restrict-filenames I mentioned before you’ll get _11-vFVNOaUPRow.f247.mp3 (notice that the greek characters have been removed since they are not safe).

So if you use the --restrict-filenames parameter you’ll get an output that contains only the video id (and any safe characters it may find) while if you don’t use it you’ll get the normal title of the video. However, most stereos do not display unicode characters properly so if I get this file to my car I’ll see garbage and I won’t be able to identify it — I will be able to listen it but not see its name!

To fix that, I propose transliterating the unicode characters using the unidecode library. Just install it using pip. Then you can the following script to rename all mp3 files in a directory to using english characters only:

import os, unidecode

if __name__ == '__main__':
    for file in os.listdir('.'):
        if file.endswith('mp3'):
            print("Renaming {0} to {1}".format(file, unidecode.unidecode(file)))
            os.rename(file, unidecode.unidecode(file))

Copy this to a file named transliterate.py and run it in a directory containing mp3 files (py -3 transliterate.py) to rename them to non-unicode characters.