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YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

rg3.github.io

221–230 of 338 posts

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#221
post #28

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 becau…

Spot on!

However I worry that if projects such as this or mps-youtube (console youtube player) get mainstream, they would be effectively shut down in some way...

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#222
post #28

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 becau…

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.

I hope you haven't voted this article then. Let's keep it secret ;)

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think just clicking the link and then clicking a different link counts against the first link. It probably doesn't matter if you actually use the back button or not. I don't know how they account for people clicking multiple links in new tabs. My guess is they reorder links sometimes so that users that click multiple links cancel each other out. They just try to maximize the probability you will click on a link and…

Well, I guess I cause a LOT of bad rankings for sites. I tend to just open a lot of results in different tabs, then go through them one by one.

Yeah, me too. My typical pattern when doing a search is to quickly middle-click the first three or four promising-looking results and look through those, and if that wasn't enough, go back for more.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#224
post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not easy because it's an command line. > Not a single family member would touch this here. > It's sad but understandable. I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath. In the case of t…

You missed a couple steps at the beginning there: - Select browser icon - Double click browser icon - Click into search box - Type "youtube" - Disregard suggestions, hit enter - Click on first thing that says YouTube

Well, there are lots of ways people interact with browsers; that was just an example. Personally I don't type "google.com", "youtube.com" either, I use Conkeror's web shortcuts.

Still, the point is that it's not much different than running a commandline, e.g. something like:

- Click Gnome Do icon

- type "youtube-dl " and paste URL

- Click the "run" suggestion

- Click on Home launcher

- Watch filename until ".f123." bit disappears from the extension

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

[deleted]

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's not easy because it's an command line. > Not a single family member would touch this here. > It's sad but understandable. I can understand why many people will avoid using commandlines. The part I don't understand is how they're quite comfortable when those commandlines are surrounded by "Forward", "Back", "Stop" and "Reload" buttons; or when they have an "I'm feeling lucky" button underneath. In the case of t…

>youtube-dl actually has quite sane defaults not really, if you copy url of a clip in a playlist it will start downloading WHOLE playlist :(

As it was pointed out the first time youtube-dl was on Hacker News, our user base seems to be split regarding that behavior. When you copy a URL from a playlist, the URL includes both the video id and the playlist id.

Some people want to download the whole playlist when passing a URL from one of the videos (because otherwise it's hard to get an URL that contains just the playlist). Some other people just want to download the video they are currently watching.

That's why we have the --no-playlist option, which you can use and even stick in the configuration file. There's also --yes-playlist to override the configuration file if you need to.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#228
post #6

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

.. or just use a bookmarklet from keepvid.com, alltubedownload.net and myriad of other sites. I really have no clue who would put up with a CLI solution. Perhaps only people who run a tiling WM or something.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#229
post #5

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 i…

I like this command to extract audio from youtube videos: youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3

If your music player supports OGG, you can also use youtube-dl -f FORMAT VIDEO_URL and give a numeric format that corresponds to a DASH webm audio-only stream, with vorbis audio (e.g. format 171 these days). The container is webm but it can be trivially changed to OGG with ffmpeg, which you can call via --exec automatically.

Edit: I mentioned that because you don't lose any quality reencoding.

Re: YouTube-dl: Open-source YouTube downloader

#230
post #35
post #28

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 becau…

It's not easy because it's an command line. Not a single family member would touch this here. It's sad but understandable.

Can't find the link now but I remember a computer educator in the UK describing how he taught the command-line to a bunch of seniors.

They had been complaining about how difficult it was to follow all the crazy windows popping up everywhere and never knowing which button to click. This is actually a problem for many seniors.

One day he installed Linux on a PC, booted into the console, and told them that this was "story mode". He gave them a list of commands along with mnemonics, and talked about how in "story mode" you always had a list of all the commands you typed so you always knew what you'd been doing.

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