
YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader - h43k3r
https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/
======
guycook
The tragedy of this software (and many like it) is that despite working
exactly as advertised, easily and with a lot of features, because it's a quiet
open source project without any SEO rigging it will never appear in page 1 of
any searches by laymen trying to download videos ("save youtube to hard
drive", "download youtube videos" et al).

The amount of crapware I've had to remove from family member's PCs just
because they wanted to save a video is ridiculous.

~~~
baldfat
I treat youtube-dl like Fight Club. I am glad it isn't on the top of searches
since I am afraid sites would start trying to stop it from working harder.

~~~
dexterdog
They already do. That's why it updates pretty much every time I do a homebrew
update.

~~~
baldfat
I should have said. They would try harder.

------
FiloSottile
Nostalgia time. Even though I'm not actively involved anymore, youtube-dl has
been the first OSS project I seriously contributed to, and strangers still
thank me at conferences for it.

I owe a lot to the maintainers (hey, phihag!) for tolerating and trusting a
much younger version of me :)

I still remember the emotion of getting this merged:
[https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/pull/342](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/pull/342)

It's also one of the most impressive community efforts I've seen, with just
about anyone contributing support for new sites and fixing broken ones:
[https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/graphs/contributors](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/graphs/contributors)
(notice how the GH interface is limited to 100 contributors, and #100 still
has 3 commits in the tree)

~~~
Kristine1975
Thank you for your work on youtube-dl!

------
jtokoph
Some of the things that make this the 'ultimate':

\- Supports hundreds of services, not just youtube [0]

\- Allows you to extract audio in multiple formats

\- Download entire playlists (and general batch support)

\- Configure video/audio quality

\- Extract/build metadata

\- Cross platform

[0] [https://rg3.github.io/youtube-
dl/supportedsites.html](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)

~~~
zavi
\- Illegal

~~~
vbit
Not illegal perhaps but violates the TOS

~~~
zwetan
how enforceable is the TOS ?

once something is published on the internet then it is assumed it can be
viewed / copied / downloaded / etc.

see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping)
, the legal issues part.

~~~
vbit
Copyright is different and enforceable - see what RIAA did to some
downloaders.

------
Kristine1975
I've been using it for years now and it's great. Not only for Youtube videos,
but also for a lot of other video hosters, up to and including TV stations
such as the German ZDF or the French Arte.

To fully use its features you should install ffmpeg though. Youtube-dl will
automatically use it if it's in the PATH, and then can download Youtube videos
with higher frame rates and resolutions (they store video and audio in
separate files, and ffmpeg is used to mux both together). ffmpeg is also
required to download from some streaming video hosters.

For me it's essentially:

    
    
      youtube-dl -F '<url>'
    

to get the list of available video and audio formats, followed by

    
    
      youtube-dl -f <video format>+<audio format> '<url>'
    

and then wait for the download to complete. And

    
    
      youtube-dl -U
    

to self-update youtube-dl (because it gets updated just about every day).

~~~
awqrre
I like this command to extract audio from youtube videos:

    
    
        youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 <url>

~~~
melicerte
That's my main use of youtube-dl for years now. I'm extracting audio from old
french movies available on youtube, work a small sound extract with audacity
and then post the result on soudcloud[1].

[1] A bit of self-promotion here, if you are interested this is my soundcloud
playlist [https://soundcloud.com/melicerte/sets/extraits-de-vieux-
film...](https://soundcloud.com/melicerte/sets/extraits-de-vieux-films)

~~~
wingerlang
Why?

~~~
luxpir
Why not!

~~~
wingerlang
I'm not against it or anything, I'm just wondering if it is a personal
interest or if there is some niche usage I am unaware of.

------
SG-
Here's something i've added to my .bashrc that lets me type in simply 'play
<some song name>' using youtube-dl and mplayer (I forget where I found this
gem, and sorry for weird formatting, won):

    
    
      function play {
    
         youtube-dl --default-search=ytsearch: \
                    --youtube-skip-dash-manifest \
                    --output="${TMPDIR:-/tmp/}%(title)-s%(id)s.%(ext)s" \
                    --restrict-filenames \
                    --format="bestaudio[ext!=webm]" \
                    --exec=mplayer -vvv "$*"
      }
    

play rick astley never gonna give you up

~~~
tombrossman
One very minor annoyance I had was using it with BBC iPlayer. It works, but
downloads the video as many dozens of tiny parts to reassemble. Since I use
~/Desktop as my default downloads folder, I created this to keep my desktop
uncluttered while it runs:

    
    
      ytdl()
      {
        mkdir /tmp/ytdl && cd /tmp/ytdl
        for item in "$@" ; do youtube-dl "$@" ; done ;
        mv /tmp/ytdl/* ~/Desktop/
        rm -rf /tmp/ytdl
        exit
      }
    

Now I can Ctrl + Alt + T a new Terminal window, type ytdl
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/..](http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/..).
(can use multiple links) then minimise the window and move on to other things.

~~~
porsupah
Wouldn't get_iplayer be simpler?

[http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html](http://www.infradead.org/get_iplayer/html/get_iplayer.html)

------
sdk77
I'm in China and streaming youtube videos is mostly out of the question, due
to the very unpredictable and usually too slow nature of connectivity (I gave
up on VPN long time ago and use a number of strategically placed cheap virtual
servers). Over the years, youtube-dl has been a godsend. I ssh into one of my
servers, download the video and then rsync it over to my laptop. Most of the
time I don't really need to have the video stored locally - if I was at home
I'd just stream it again - but for some niche applications like mine it's next
to nothing. The buffering built in to youtube itself too often just stops or
throws me into 'an error has occurred'.

~~~
evanreichard
Why not use an SSH tunnel as a SOCKS proxy? Would save you a few steps there.

~~~
dylz
Standard ssh tunnels get torn down or throttled or reset.

------
ryuuchin
Another great thing about youtube-dl is its integration in mpv[1]. On Windows
as long as you have both mpv.exe[2] and youtube-dl.exe in the same folder you
can use it to play pretty much whatever youtube-dl supports. This should also
work on *nix/Mac as well just check your distro's repo's or wherever you look
for stuff like that on Mac (can you tell I've not used Mac stuff ever).

I rather like using it for things like twitch streams since I can bypass
having to use Flash and get a higher quality renderer in the process (with
things like high quality scaling[3] and debanding[4]). And it goes without
saying that it's nice for youtube stuff as well because of the aforementioned
benefits. Basically it makes stuff look even better than if you watched it the
browser, and I like that.

[1] [https://mpv.io/](https://mpv.io/)

[2] [https://mpv.srsfckn.biz/](https://mpv.srsfckn.biz/) (official Windows
builds)

[3] [https://mpv.io/manual/master/#video-output-drivers-
opengl](https://mpv.io/manual/master/#video-output-drivers-opengl) mpv
supports ewa_lanczossharp (aka jinc) for scaling among others

[4] Also a huge fan of the debanding which can be left on all the time

------
danso
Mostly OT: A friend of mine posted this article from his local newspaper as an
example of how slow news is in his town:

[http://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/what-is-a-
gif/...](http://www.ottumwacourier.com/news/local_news/what-is-a-
gif/article_c1d84944-e92a-11e5-a095-eb219cc6cd71.html)

> _What is a GIF?_

> _OTTUMWA — Chances are if you have been on the Internet lately, you have
> encountered a GIF...In honor of National Teen Tech Week, the Ottumwa Public
> Library offered a session on GIF making for local teens Saturday afternoon._

OK, not a traditional article topic for a newspaper, but the library described
seems to be very much on the ball, teaching teens how to use youtube-dl to
download movies:

> _He walked each of the teens through the steps required for making GIFs by
> using movie trailers found on YouTube. He then had the kids copy the web
> address and use the program youtube-dl to download the video. OPL also
> provided flash drives for each person so they could access the program at
> home._

~~~
Kristine1975
Don't knock gif, it's still used a lot on image boards[1] and most likely
Facebook etc, too. Knowing how to make them can be quite useful for today's
teens.

[1] E.g. 4chan, which even has its own boards just for animated gifs: /gif/
(NSFW) and /wsg/ (SFW)

~~~
kragniz
These days it's all about the webms, though. Luckily youtube-dl is even more
useful for that.

~~~
raihansaputra
but manually downloading each image/webm in a thread is not fun. i resort to
use httrack and it works wonderfully.

------
extrapolar
Note that it is against YouTube's ToS to download videos:
[https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms](https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms)

"You may access Content for your information and personal use solely as
intended through the provided functionality of the Service and as permitted
under these Terms of Service. You shall not download any Content unless you
see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that
Content."

~~~
elthran
I'd have more sympathy if youtube hadn't removed the "preloading" feature on
the android app - I was an avid user of this feature for train journeys where
I have little signal. Now I'm using downloaders. These sort of violations are
always of the company's own making.

~~~
magicalhobo
From [https://www.youtube.com/red](https://www.youtube.com/red): "Enjoy videos
without ads–and in the background or offline on mobile devices"

~~~
corobo
Also from [https://www.youtube.com/red](https://www.youtube.com/red): "YouTube
Red is not currently available in United Kingdom."

------
agumonkey
The work-horse. If the author/maintainers are here, thanks a lot. With an old
laptop I need mpv/mplayer to be able to play videos without overheating.
youtube-dl is my youtube backend, one of the most used commands on my
terminal.

------
mundanevoice
This is a great project. I have been using it for more than 4 years and it has
never disappointed me ever. It picks up from the interrupted download, can
convert in any format you prefer and get only audio out if you will.

Great work guys! Thanks for creating such an awesome piece of software.

~~~
rg3
Thanks for your kind words on behalf of the current team.[1]

[1] [http://rg3.name/201408141628.html](http://rg3.name/201408141628.html)

------
leni536
Note that mpv integrates well with youtube-dl. With an "open with" like addon
it's relly handy especially on sites that are still stuck on flash.

------
mtrn
youtube-dl is great. It belongs to a class of software, that could not exists
without a place like github (or any platform, that makes it easy to
contribute). Many developers (here: 403) sharing the burden of keeping the
scrapers up-to-date, which would be a dull and mind-numbing task for a single
person or small group of people.

Other wonderful projects in this category would be homebrew[1], wiki*, OSM,
...

------
lochlainn
Nothing but positive experiences with youtube-dl, invaluable piece of software
IMO.

For people interested in tools like this, or for people who want to just watch
videos without downloading, I would also recommend Livestreamer. I use it to
watch Crunchyroll streams, and I avoid all the strange issues that come up
with their terrible player. No more skipping to random sections of the
episode.
[https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer](https://github.com/chrippa/livestreamer)

------
corradio
I actually made a small script to download offline youtube videos using
youtube-dl.

[https://github.com/corradio/watchlater](https://github.com/corradio/watchlater)
[https://oliviercorradi.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/3/](https://oliviercorradi.wordpress.com/2013/11/19/3/)

------
joeyspn
Download mp3 with the maximum possible quality.

$ youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 --output
"%(title)s.%(ext)s" <URL>

~~~
mrspeaker
Also, a lot of times I'll quickly grab videos from my youtube subs to listen
to while I jog: if it's a video then the screen would stay on, so I just grab
the audio with `youtube-dl -f 140 <URL>.` This downloads just an m4a that
works on my iPhone. It's not ALWAYS format 140 (-F to see them all) but
usually.

------
rb2k_
Huge props to the team working on this.

I once maintained something similar in Ruby ([https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-
rb](https://github.com/rb2k/viddl-rb)), and the amount of changes necessary
just to keep a hand full of plugins up-to-date is crazy.

------
bfung
If you use mac, it's available on homebrew. even easier.

------
givan
I use vlctube
[https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube](https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/1783-vlctube)
to not only download youtube videos but to also use vlc as default player,
there is a huge performance boost, I no longer hear my cpu fan when playing a
youtube video.

------
amelius
It would be nice if there was a "shadow" version of youtube on bittorrent. So
instead of using youtube-dl, you could just pull the file from bittorrent.
Besides this being faster in most cases, it would also mean that a big part of
our cultural heritage is no longer locked inside google's silo.

------
ismyrnow
There's an app called Free Download Manager which has this feature. I suspect
it may be using youtube-dl under the hood, since the functionality looks
similar (with a GUI, of course). The app allows you to copy/paste youtube urls
and it parses the page for available downloads (audio and video). I use it
regularly for putting technical talks onto my phone to watch or listen to on
my commute.

The app is very easy to use, and one of the few I would recommend to a non-
technical person for the features it has.

I know the name makes it sound like spyware, but it's the most lightweight
tool I've found for both this and the occasional torrent.

[http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/](http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/)

------
lottin
The only thing that irritates me about youtube-dl is that by default it will
try download audio and video tracks separately and then remux them on your
computer. While it's a cool feature, I don't think this is what most people
want 99% of the time.

~~~
asddubs
Don't know why this is being downvoted. VLC can play .part files of many
formats, but not if they're seperate streams. I wish there was a way to just
download the highest format that will download only one file.

~~~
clarry

        -f best
    

It's in the documentation.

~~~
asddubs
no, that's the highest format, not the highest format that will download in
one file, as opposed to two which have to be merged, meaning playing .part
files is impossible

~~~
clarry
Are you saying the documentation is wrong? And not once but twice:

    
    
        You can also use special names to select particular edge case format:
        
        * best: Select best quality format represented by
                single file with video and audio
    
     

And again:

> Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses -f
> bestvideo+bestaudio/ _best_ as default format selection (see #5447, #5456).
> If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading bestvideo and
> bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file giving the
> best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to _best_ and
> _results in downloading the best available quality served as a single file_

~~~
asddubs
oh duh, sorry. I thought I read somewhere that best was the default option

------
Walkman
Here is a script I use to download a lot of videos in a queue with it:
[https://github.com/kissgyorgy/interactive-youtube-
dl](https://github.com/kissgyorgy/interactive-youtube-dl)

------
k4rtik
User for >4 years. Absolutely love the nifty little tool. But I hated opening
up a terminal each time I wanted to initiate a download.

For PopClip[1] users on Mac, I made a little YouTube-dl extension[2] which
lets you initiate the download just by selecting the video URL (best when done
from browser's address bar) and clicking a button. Been using it as my primary
ytdl client for past 5 months now.

[1]: [https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/](https://pilotmoon.com/popclip/)

[2]: [https://github.com/k4rtik/popclip-
ytdl](https://github.com/k4rtik/popclip-ytdl)

~~~
noobie
This is exactly why I love FOSS. The main functionality is there and every
user can customize it to best suit his needs.

------
joshstrange
I've used this tool a ton of times and it is a standard install on my
multimedia fetching VM. I really want to take the time to allow for a
Sonarr[0]-for-youtube (and other supported sites) app that uses this on the
backend. For example I love CGPGrey but don't want to constantly be
downloading new videos (But I do want to watch them through my Plex setup).
Some channels have convenient playlists I can download (and keep downloading)
but I normally want to change the naming to a convention I specificy.

[0] [https://sonarr.tv/](https://sonarr.tv/)

------
MiguelVieira
Honest question: why would you want to download a video from YouTube? The main
use case I can think of is you want to watch videos offline on a mobile device
but don't want to pay for a YouTube Red subscription.

~~~
kevincox
Mostly offline use. It's nice to be able to include them in a presentation.
Rarely archiving is useful, especially if you think a video might get taken
down. Also sometimes you want to grab a clip, for example if you are including
it in a larger video.

I don't do it very often (except for mobile watching without burning quite as
much battery) but I see a number of use cases.

------
milge
Recently, I wrote a chrome plugin that saves information of all of the songs I
listen to on youtube to amazon since youtube's history API is shit.
Theoretically, I could write a nightly job that runs YouTube-dl to turn all of
those videos into MP3s. Taking it even further, I could run a nightly SyncMe
job on my phone to copy the MP3s locally. A setup like this would be good for
people with limited phone bandwidth. Imagine not having to search out MP3s
anymore. Is it still considered pirating if a robot does it?

~~~
Kenji
Yeah but how are they gonna detect it. Streaming a video is pretty much
indistinguishable from downloading since that's what you actually do. If
there's no claimant, there's no judge. I'd say things like that are de facto
legal since it cannot be enforced.

------
interfixus
I have a sort of atavistic thing against streaming. I download things, and
then I watch.

This is a really nifty tool, though I must say that Flashgot on Firefox does
the job nicely for me, 99% of the time.

------
plug
What a funny coincidence - I just discovered and used this a few hours ago. I
wanted to rip some YT audio from (mostly) old records that I have that are not
on Spotify etc.

I looked at some browser plugins but I wasn't really impressed. This, on the
other hand, was a great discovery. Really configurable and well documented.

Assuming you have `ffmpeg` installed just run:

`youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 $URL`

and you're done! I expect my phone will be packed of bizarre prog/jazz before
the end of the weekend :D

~~~
rg3
If your phone supports OGG and you're downloading from YouTube, you can
download format 171 (-f 171) and change the container to OGG with ffmpeg. That
way you won't lose any quality.

------
bradlys
If you want a button built into youtube's webpages in Chrome this will do too.
I believe there are other projects that do similar things but many aim at
doing much more (mine is solely for the little download button which offers
all the video/audio formats that youtube-dl does).

[https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-
panda](https://github.com/bradlys/monochromatic-panda)

------
SBartels
I really don't like how others profit from the work of the youtube-dl
developers. The developers should build their own client-facing websites and
apps.

------
yasoob
This is a simple GUI which I made for this script: github.com/yasoob/youtube-
dl-gui. I hope you guys would like it :) All bug reports are welcome.

------
nxzero
YouTube needs a "download" button; love this code, it works like magic, but
for the average user the real answer is that YouTube needs a way to download a
video; otherwise, YouTube is just enabling all the 3rd party sites that
exploit YouTube making it easy to "hack" a way to download the files, but hard
for the average user who ends up getting malware to download the video.

------
pieter_mj
previous discussion :
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8647943)

I used this (on windows) to easily convert/resize videos i had saved earlier
using a file:/// url, but this possibility has been removed since a few months
because of the obvious security hole (in a linux context)

------
Jarwin
Not just YouTube, over 200 websites including daily motion, vimeo and, well
were all adults here so I'm just gonna say it,pornhub. Supports
authentication. And you can download with any format using -f flag. Also I'm
not sure about that, but I thing you can use apt-get to download it as well.

------
adrianbd
I often use mps-youtube, which I believe is based on youtube-dl and works
great to listen to music off youtube from the terminal.

[https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps-
youtube/mps-youtube)

------
ontouchstart
I have a docker image to run it on OSX, haven't tested on Windows yet.

[https://hub.docker.com/r/ontouchstart/docker-youtube-
dl/](https://hub.docker.com/r/ontouchstart/docker-youtube-dl/)

~~~
robinson-wall
It's usable natively on OSX, but Docker isn't.

Surely running youtube-dl inside a docker container inside a virtualbox VM
created by boot2docker isn't easier?

------
akagetsu01
I made something like that over Christmas..it's pretty shit but it works to
download youtube videos as mp3 :-/
[http://akagetsu.com/youtube/](http://akagetsu.com/youtube/)

~~~
946789987649
Is this open source by any chance?

------
tachion
There's a web app[0] that uses youtube-dl to provide non-cli functionality.
Does anyone knows if there's similar tool/lib in Go?

[0] [http://pullz.in](http://pullz.in)

~~~
mavhc
Nice, although it crashes when given RTMPE youtube links.

~~~
tachion
What's an RTMPE link?

~~~
mavhc
Encrypted streaming, eg,
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsWrShXPDPo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gsWrShXPDPo)

4 year old bug [https://github.com/rg3/youtube-
dl/issues/343](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/343)

------
aryamaan
Not exactly related to this but I remember someone wrote a script which lets
you download any song (by name, artist or some phrase from the song).

It uses youtube api to search the song and then download it using youtube-dl.

~~~
Kristine1975
Look in this very thread, it does almost what you want:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453377](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453377)

------
aguynamedben
Been using it for a while. Great for hacks, downloading 360 VR videos,
downloading all videos for a channel.

Was happy to see it here, it's nothing new, just a great tool, great job of
surfacing it HN!

------
maremp
Why is this so popular last 24h? I am using it for about a year and never saw
this much hype. Is there any new feature or is it just that someone
rediscovered it and it went viral?

------
jaimehrubiks
I built a gui/music downloader using this last year. Called musicBoo in case
you want to check it out. Its multiplatform, having problems in deployment
though (in java swing)

------
em3rgent0rdr
Initial commit is from 2008. I think title should be updated to reflect the
initial year, since this is not a new project. I've been personally using this
for many years.

~~~
rg3
Actually, the project started as far back as 2006 and moved to git in 2008,
hence the first commit having that date. I don't remember the exact day I
started the project, but on freshcode (formerly freshmeat), the first listed
version is 2006.08.08.

~~~
em3rgent0rdr
thank you. I was careful to word my sentence to not imply that the project was
necessarily started in 2008.

------
justinwr
Damnit! I hate it when people advertise my favorite software.

------
diegorbaquero
I used this years ago to create a Youtube2MP3 site. This tool is great. Nice
to see that it's still alive and maintained

~~~
visarga
Second this. I use it to make mp3 playlists. I don't bother too much with
mp3's nowadays, but there is a second good reason to download: it's because
YouTube bookmarked videos might disappear suddenly. If you want to make sure
they remain accessible, you have to download them.

------
konart
I'm amazed many people do not know about it, considering it is installed via
brew together with mpv, lol.

------
noir_lord
youtube-dl -f 141 <link>

Gives you decent quality audio file from pretty much any video, you can even
feed it a playlist.

------
hatsunearu
fun fact: mpv couples youtube-dl to itself and can view youtube videos simply
from the command line.

example:

mpv
"[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3Ey4YChtEU")

(you need quotes because most shells will try to glob match)

------
MrBra
Time to revive an old debate: is downloading video or audio from YouTube for
personal use illegal?

------
CoelacanthsKill
I've been using this for years to rip ~256k mp3's off youtube.

------
goldenrules
i love youtube-dl. i've been interested in doing the same with soundcloud, but
i have no idea how to go about learning how their streaming works. any advice
for where to start?

~~~
looknee
I actually have a small node program that downloads your entire Favorites
collection by just providing your username as a command line argument if you
or anyone's interested

~~~
nathanasmith
Um, I'd be interested!

------
sig_chld_mike
what idiots. there isn't one complete example of how to use the project with a
url from Youtube. Instead we have to decrypt what the hell the documentation
means.

~~~
clarry

        youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]
    

Any examples would be just noise.

------
jayadeeptp
Isn't it against the ToS of Youtube to download videos?

~~~
Crespyl
Technically, yes, but what do you think is happening when you watch a video
from their site?

------
GizaDog
Great stuff! I wish I can program stuff like this.

------
techaddict009
Isn't it illegal to download youtube videos?

~~~
Nadya
Yes and No and may depend on where you live.

Germany has a law that permits downloading for personal use. AFAIK in Germany
that would trump YouTube's Terms of Service. ToS are legally binding, for the
most part [0]. Though there may be parts that aren't enforceable or wouldn't
hold up in the court of law.

YouTube Terms of Service [1] doesn't permit "creating a copy". In practice
this is never enforced when the video is used under Fair Use. Otherwise you'd
never see any Youtubers reviewing other Youtube videos. While it is against
the Terms of Service, I'm not sure if it would actually hold up in court.

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_service)

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms](https://www.youtube.com/static?template=terms)

> _Content is provided to you AS IS. You may access Content for your
> information and personal use solely as intended through the provided
> functionality of the Service and as permitted under these Terms of Service.
> You shall not download any Content unless you see a “download” or similar
> link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content. You shall not
> copy, reproduce, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, or
> otherwise exploit any Content for any other purposes without the prior
> written consent of YouTube or the respective licensors of the Content.
> YouTube and its licensors reserve all rights not expressly granted in and to
> the Service and the Content._

------
jisagigi
Any thoughts on livestreamer vs Youtube-dl

------
alvern
So excited to try this out tonight

------
pknerd
Works like charm. Only if laymen can be convinced that CLI is far easier than
GUI.

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fordarnold
Nice simple tool

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rasz_pl
The best use case for youtube-dl is extracting direct mp4 link and piping it
to mplayer

youtube-dl -g url | mplayer

~~~
pritambaral
mpv (which calls itself a better mplayer) and vlc both use youtube-dl
internally if given a youtube url to play.

------
draugadrotten
> It's a bit worrying how many people run to defend corporation profits by
> default.

Surely you are keen to make a profit yourself with your unicorn startup idea,
dear unique snowflake.

~~~
dang
This comment breaks the HN guidelines. Please post civilly and substantively
or not at all.

We detached it from
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453077](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11453077)
and marked it off-topic.

------
personjerry
I feel like "ultimate" in the title is misleading.

