Youtube-dl: Tips that you might not know

Tools to download videos from YouTube there are quite a few. Windows, Android, iPhone and Blackberry users can download tubemate for free and users of GNU / Linux We know that one of the best tools (if not the best) to download videos from YouTube it is precisely youtube-dl, an application that we run through the terminal.

Although we have already talked about this tool on other occasions, this time I bring you some tips that you may not have known. So let's get started.

How to use youtube-dl?

Of course, the first thing is to know how to use this tool, which is found in most of the distributions. Its basic use would be:

$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higI04jG6R8

But beware (and here comes the first detail) not only works with YouTube, it has extensive list of sites from which we can download videos, including adult sites.

To update this tool once installed, we can use the command:

$youtube-dl -U

Of course, if we install from the repositories it is possible that we get this poster:

We can also download the videos in all available formats that it has, for this we use the –all-format option:

$ youtube-dl --all-formats https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higI04jG6R8

If we want to download only the video in a specific format, we use the –format option:

$ youtube-dl --format 46 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higI04jG6R8

Where the number we put varies according to the format and size of the video, for example:

37 - mp4 [1080x1920] 46 - webm [1080x1920] 22 - mp4 [720x1280] 45 - webm [720x1280] 35 - flv [480x854] 44 - webm [480x854] 34 - flv [360x640] 18 - mp4 [360x640] 43 - webm [360x640] 5 - flv [240x400] 17 - mp4 [144x176]

We can also download a list of videos, for this we just put them in a text document and execute:

$ youtube-dl -a enlaces.txt

If we use a proxy server, we can download videos with the –proxy URL parameter:

$ youtube-dl --format 46 --proxy http://192.168.0.1:3128 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=higI04jG6R8

Here are some of the options that may be of interest:

GLASS OPTIONS
-i : When there are download errors, for example, the video that is not available in a playlist skips.
--abort-on-error : Abort downloading more videos (in playlist or command line) if error occurs
--dump-user-agent : show current browser id
--user-agent UA : specify a custom user agent
--no-check-certificate : Suppresses HTTPS certificate validation.
--playlist-start NUMBER : Download a playlist, starts at number 1 by default.
--playlist-end NUMBER : Download a playlist, starts the last number by default.
--min-filesize SIZE : Do not download any video smaller than the SIZE value (for example 50k or 44.6m)
--max-filesize SIZE : Do not download any video larger than the SIZE value (for example 50k or 44.6m)
--date DATE : Download videos only uploaded on a certain date.
--datebefore DATE : Download videos before or on a certain date.
--dateafter DATE : Download videos after or on a certain date.
--min-views COUNT : Do not download the videos with less than X number of visits seen
--max-views COUNT : Do not download videos with more than X number of visits seen
--rate-limit LIMIT : Limit the maximum download speed in bytes per second (for example, 50K or 4.2M)
--retries RETRIES : Number of retries (default is 10)

And as always, you can find many more options if you open a terminal and put:

$ man youtube-dl

Well if you don't want to use Youybe-dl, you can get more information about TubeMate, or some other similar application, for Android there are many more that do the same 😀