Development status Active | Written in Python | |
Developer(s) Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez, Philipp Hagemeister, Filippo Valsorda, Jaime Marquínez Ferrándiz, Yen Chi Hsuan, Remita Amine, Sergey M., Naglis Jonaitis, pulpe. Initial release 2006; 11 years ago (2006) Stable release 2017.03.20 (March 20, 2017; 19 days ago (2017-03-20)) [±] Repository github.com/rg3/youtube-dl | ||
youtube-dl is a command-line utility for downloading videos or extracting audio files from streaming websites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, and Vimeo. The software is written using Python. youtube-dl is public domain software under the Unlicense waiver/license.
Contents
Usage
youtube-dl is executed through a command-line interface, although several graphical user interface (GUI) front-ends exist. The minimal amount of information required is a supported URL to a video on YouTube or various other sites, from which youtube-dl will automatically download the file:
Many other optional parameters may also be specified.
Windows
Windows users can download an .exe file which can then be placed into a directory in the user's PATH. (It can usually be placed in the user's home folder, e.g. C:UsersUSERNAME.) It can then be launched from the command prompt.
MacOS
Mac users can install youtube-dl through different command-line programs, all of which are executed through Terminal.app. Some are default programs while others need to be downloaded and installed separately.
cURL:
Homebrew:
MacPorts:
Linux/Unix
For Fedora and RHEL Linux installations, youtube-dl is hosted in an epel repository. For Debian or Ubuntu it is available from the webupd8 Personal Package Archive.
Dependencies
youtube-dl is dependent on several other command-line tools. For post-processing and merge operations it uses either FFmpeg or avconv. For extracting media from a Macromedia RTMP stream it uses RTMPDump. These utilities are not included with youtube-dl, and need to be downloaded separately.
Windows users will need to download executable builds from their respective webpages and placed in the same folder as youtube-dl. MacOS users can install dependencies through Homebrew with brew install [DEPENDENCYNAME].
Supported sites
The following is a list of noteworthy websites supported by youtube-dl.