A few days ago , the release of a new version of yt-dlp was announced. This utility allows users to download audio and video from services like YouTube. It's a fork of youtube-dl based on the now-defunct youtube-dlc project.
So far we can see the stagnation of the development of the original youtube-dl project, since its last release took place on June 5, 2021 and since then there have been no new releases, despite the presence of a series of new confirmations in the master branch.
At the same time, some nasty bugs (for example, problems downloading YouTube videos with age restrictions) remain uncorrected, which, coupled with the notorious lack of activity, raises various questions from users.
About yt-dlp
The main focus of yt-dlp development is adding new features and fixes, while maintaining all relevant features from the original project, such as format sorting. The default format sorting options have been changed to prioritize higher resolution and better codecs over simply using a higher bitrate. Additionally, you can now specify the sort order using `-S`. This allows for much easier format selection than is possible with just `-format`.
Likewise, most of the features from other forks of youtube-dl have been imported, in particular the "--write-comments" option (loading video comments in infojson), embedding previews in mp4/ogg/opus and others.
Among the new features of yt-dlp that are missing from the original are:
- Use the SponsorBlock API to remove / flag sponsored posts on YouTube videos.
- Ability to download YouTube Music albums.
- The ability to easily import cookies from the browser.
- Divide the video into chapters.
- Multi-threaded download of video clips.
- Possibility to use aria2c to download DASH (mpd) and HLS (m3u8).
- New video extractors
- All feeds (: ytfav,: ytwatchlater,: ytsubs,: ythistory,: ytrec) and supports private playlists download from multiple content pages
- Search (ytsearch :, ytsearchdate :), search urls and channel search work
- Mixes supports downloading of multiple content pages
- Partial solution for the limitation problem
- Automatically redirect channel / video start url to preserve old behavior
- Subtitle extraction from manifests: Subtitles can be extracted from broadcast media manifests.
- Multiple Output Templates and Paths - You can provide different output templates and download paths for different types of files.
- You can also set a temporary path where the intermediate files are downloaded using –paths (-P)
- Portable Configuration - Configuration files are automatically loaded from the root and home directories.
- Output template enhancements: Output templates can now be formatted for date and time, numeric offsets, object traversal, and more.
- Other new options: –print, –sleep-requests, –convert-thumbnails, –write-link, –force-download-archive, –force-overwrites, –break-on-rejectetc.
- Enhancements: Regex and other operators in –match-filter, faster multiple file check –postprocessor-argsy –downloader-args, more format selection options, and more.
Main news of yt-dlp 2021.09.02
This new version highlights the inclusion of interaction with the SponsorBlock API , since previously SponSkrub was used for this purpose.
New options were also added to remove or embed video chapters and experimental support for DASH manifests (requires ffmpeg with this patch).
Regarding extractors, it is mentioned that numerous corrections were made to existing extractors, in addition to the addition of new ones , such as: BannedVideo, bilibili, Epicon, filmmodu, GabTV, Hungama, ManotoTV, Niconico, Patreon, peloton, ProjectVeritas, radiko, StarTV, tiktok, Tokentube, TV2Hu, voicy.
Finally, if you are interested in learning more about this project, you can find the details at the following link.
Get yt-dlp
For those who are interested in being able to install this application, they can do it with pip:
python3 -m pip install --upgrade yt-dlp
Or another method is with:
sudo wget https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -O /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp