Every so often you come across a video on Youtube that you really want. Youtube downloaders come and go. Some work for a long time some work for a couple months. Youtube-dl is a simple CLI for Linux that works great for the time being, allows you to download in multiple formats, and is fairly simple to use. The man pages for the program are very easy to read and almost self explanatory.
With Fedora I simply opened up my terminal program, typed:
yum install youtube-dl
and yum did all the work for me. The CLI was installed and I read through the man pages.
man youtube-dl
For the sake of this tutorial I'll just go through the basics to get the program doing what it's supposed to do. For further info just read the man pages.
Go to youtube, find a video you want to download.
Now open up your terminal program , I use Konsole, and type:
youtube-dl -F youtube.com/video_url_here
Replace the last part of the command with the youtube page url that has your video.
This command will show you the different formats the video is available in. Here's an example of the output:
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] kb9dxfsPdQs: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] kb9dxfsPdQs: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] kb9dxfsPdQs: Extracting video information
Available formats:
44 : webm [480x854]
35 : flv [480x854]
43 : webm [360x640]
34 : flv [360x640]
18 : mp4 [360x640]
5 : flv [240x400]
17 : mp4 [144x176]
Once you know the file format you want, simply type:
youtube-dl -f 18 youtube.com/video_url_here
and youtube-dl downloads the video in the file format of your choice. That's it, your done ! Notice -F capital letter gives you the file format, -f lower case with the number in my case 18 downloads the video in mp4 format. If you were to select -f 34 the file would be downloaded as an flv file.
That's the basics, the program offers a few other options, read through the man pages for more info. At the time of this writing the program works great, youtube downloaders tend to come and go. As youtube changes things, programs become outdated and stop working. For the time being this is my downloader of choice. Happy downloading !
My Linux skills have been limited to a basic install, and getting around in the system. I've recently decided to take the O.S. more seriously and become a full time user and more of a Linux hobbyist. This is a place for me to post notes, and other helpful information. The information here is centered around Fedora and KDE but I do post about other GNU/Linux distributions. You can find useful notes, book reviews, tutorials, videos, and whatever else I think will be useful for learning this O.S.
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