YOUTUBE-DL(1)

📦

version 2025.05.04.gita084c80 · 3 versions

2025.05.04.gita084c80 · fedora 43, fedora 44 (latest)
2025.05.04.gita084c80 · epel 9
2021.12.17 · ubuntu jammy

💖 YOUTUBE-DL 💖

okay bestie, welcome to the manual page for youtube-dl — yes, that one, the icon, the legend, the moment. it's from the General Commands Manual section of your life and it's about to be your new obsession. grab a snack, we're doing this 🍓

✨ NAME ✨

youtube-dl — download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms 🎬✨

no literally that's it, that's the whole job, and it does it so well.

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

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

so you give it some OPTIONS, you give it one or more *URL*s, and it does the thing. you can throw as many URLs at it as you want, it's not gonna complain 💅

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

youtube-dl is a command-line program that downloads videos from YouTube.com and, lowkey, a whole bunch of other sites too.

it needs the Python interpreter to run — specifically version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+ — and ngl it is not platform specific. it should just work on your Unix box, on Windows, or on macOS. main character energy across every OS fr fr 💜

and here's the slay: it's released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it, or use it however you like. do whatever you want with it, it's yours. no cap. 👑

💅 OPTIONS 💅

okay this is the big one, the part everyone scrolls to. buckle up 🎀

-h, --help — prints this help text and then exits. classic.
--version — prints the program version and exits.
-U, --update — updates the program to the latest version. make sure you have sufficient permissions first (run it with sudo if you need to).
-i, --ignore-errors — keeps going even when download errors happen. perfect for when you're pulling a playlist and one of the videos is unavailable, you just skip it and move on. not today, error 💀
--abort-on-error — the opposite vibe: aborts downloading any further videos (in the playlist or on the command line) the moment an error occurs.
--dump-user-agent — displays the current browser identification.
--list-extractors — lists every supported extractor. all of them. the whole roster 🔥
--extractor-descriptions — outputs descriptions of all supported extractors.
--force-generic-extractor — forces extraction to use the generic extractor.
--default-search PREFIX — use this prefix for unqualified URLs. for example "gvsearch2:" downloads two videos from google videos for youtube-dl "large apple". you can also use the value "auto" to let youtube-dl guess, or "auto_warning" to emit a warning when it guesses. "error" just throws an error. the default value is "fixup_error", which repairs broken URLs but emits an error if that's not possible, instead of searching.
--ignore-config — don't read configuration files. when it's given in the global configuration file /etc/youtube-dl.conf, it means: don't read the user configuration in ~/.config/youtube-dl/config (%APPDATA%/youtube-dl/config.txt on Windows).
--config-location PATH — the location of the configuration file; either the path to the config itself, or the directory that contains it.
--flat-playlist — doesn't extract the videos of a playlist, only lists them.
--mark-watched — marks videos watched (YouTube only).
--no-mark-watched — doesn't mark videos watched (YouTube only).
--no-color — doesn't emit color codes in the output. for when you want it plain, no glam 💅

🌐 Network Options:

--proxy URL — uses the specified HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS proxy. to enable a SOCKS proxy, you have to specify a proper scheme — for example socks5://127.0.0.1:1080/. pass in an empty string (--proxy "") for a direct connection.
--socket-timeout SECONDS — how long to wait before giving up, in seconds.
--source-address IP — the client-side IP address to bind to.
-4, --force-ipv4 — makes all connections via IPv4.
-6, --force-ipv6 — makes all connections via IPv6.

🌍 Geo Restriction:

--geo-verification-proxy URL — uses this proxy to verify the IP address for some geo-restricted sites. the default proxy specified by --proxy (or none, if that option isn't present) is used for the actual downloading.
--geo-bypass — bypasses geographic restriction by faking the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header.
--no-geo-bypass — doesn't bypass geographic restriction by faking the X-Forwarded-For HTTP header.
--geo-bypass-country CODE — forces bypass of geographic restriction with an explicitly provided two-letter ISO 3166-2 country code.
--geo-bypass-ip-block IP_BLOCK — forces bypass of geographic restriction with an explicitly provided IP block in CIDR notation.

🎀 Video Selection:

--playlist-start NUMBER — the playlist video to start at (default is 1).
--playlist-end NUMBER — the playlist video to end at (default is the last one).
--playlist-items ITEM_SPEC — the playlist video items to download. specify indices of the videos in the playlist separated by commas, like: --playlist-items 1,2,5,8 if you want to download the videos indexed 1, 2, 5 and 8 in the playlist. you can also specify a range: --playlist-items 1-3,7,10-13 will download the videos at index 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13. obsessed with how flexible that is ✨
--match-title REGEX — downloads only matching titles (case-insensitive regex or alphanumeric sub-string).
--reject-title REGEX — skips download for matching titles (case-insensitive regex or alphanumeric sub-string).
--max-downloads NUMBER — aborts after downloading NUMBER files.
--min-filesize SIZE — doesn't download any videos smaller than SIZE (e.g. 50k or 44.6m).
--max-filesize SIZE — doesn't download any videos larger than SIZE (e.g. 50k or 44.6m).
--date DATE — downloads only videos uploaded on this date.
--datebefore DATE — downloads only videos uploaded on or before this date (i.e. inclusive).
--dateafter DATE — downloads only videos uploaded on or after this date (i.e. inclusive).
--min-views COUNT — doesn't download any videos with fewer than COUNT views.
--max-views COUNT — doesn't download any videos with more than COUNT views.
--match-filter FILTER — the generic video filter, the queen of filters 👑. specify any key (peep the "OUTPUT TEMPLATE" for the full list of available keys) to match if the key is present, !key to check if the key is not present, key > NUMBER (like "comment_count > 12", and it also works with >=, <, <=, !=, =) to compare against a number, key = 'LITERAL' (like "uploader = 'Mike Smith'", which also works with !=) to match against a string literal, and & to require multiple matches. values which aren't known are excluded unless you put a question mark (?) after the operator. for example, to only match videos that have been liked more than 100 times and disliked fewer than 50 times (or the dislike functionality isn't available at the given service), but which also have a description, use:

--match-filter "like_count > 100 & dislike_count <? 50 & description"

--no-playlist — downloads only the video, if the URL refers to both a video and a playlist.
--yes-playlist — downloads the playlist, if the URL refers to both a video and a playlist.
--age-limit YEARS — downloads only videos suitable for the given age.
--download-archive FILE — downloads only videos not already listed in the archive file. it records the IDs of all downloaded videos in it.
--include-ads — downloads advertisements as well (experimental 👀).

⬇️ Download Options:

-r, --limit-rate RATE — maximum download rate in bytes per second (e.g. 50K or 4.2M).
-R, --retries RETRIES — number of retries (default is 10), or "infinite".
--fragment-retries RETRIES — number of retries for a fragment (default is 10), or "infinite" (DASH, hlsnative and ISM).
--skip-unavailable-fragments — skips unavailable fragments (DASH, hlsnative and ISM).
--abort-on-unavailable-fragment — aborts downloading when some fragment isn't available.
--keep-fragments — keeps downloaded fragments on disk after downloading is finished; fragments are erased by default.
--buffer-size SIZE — size of the download buffer (e.g. 1024 or 16K) (default is 1024).
--no-resize-buffer — doesn't automatically adjust the buffer size. by default, the buffer size is automatically resized from an initial value of SIZE.
--http-chunk-size SIZE — size of a chunk for chunk-based HTTP downloading (e.g. 10485760 or 10M) (default is disabled). may be useful for bypassing bandwidth throttling imposed by a webserver (experimental 👀).
--playlist-reverse — downloads playlist videos in reverse order.
--playlist-random — downloads playlist videos in random order.
--xattr-set-filesize — sets the file xattribute ytdl.filesize with the expected file size.
--hls-prefer-native — uses the native HLS downloader instead of ffmpeg.
--hls-prefer-ffmpeg — uses ffmpeg instead of the native HLS downloader.
--hls-use-mpegts — uses the mpegts container for HLS videos, which allows you to play the video while downloading. note that some players may not be able to play it 🙈
--external-downloader COMMAND — uses the specified external downloader. currently supports aria2c,aria2p,avconv ,axel,curl,ffmpeg,httpie,wget
--external-downloader-args ARGS — gives these arguments to the external downloader.

📁 Filesystem Options:

-a, --batch-file FILE — a file containing URLs to download (- for stdin), one URL per line. lines starting with #, ; or ] are considered comments and get ignored.
--id — uses only the video ID in the file name.
-o, --output TEMPLATE — the output filename template. see the "OUTPUT TEMPLATE" section for all the info ✨
--output-na-placeholder PLACEHOLDER — placeholder value for unavailable meta fields in the output filename template (default is "NA").
--autonumber-start NUMBER — specifies the start value for %(autonumber)s (default is 1).
--restrict-filenames — restricts filenames to only ASCII characters, and avoids & and spaces in filenames.
-w, --no-overwrites — doesn't overwrite files.
-c, --continue — forces resume of partially downloaded files. by default, youtube-dl will resume downloads if it's possible.
--no-continue — doesn't resume partially downloaded files (it restarts from the beginning).
--no-part — doesn't use .part files, it writes directly into the output file.
--mtime — uses the Last-modified header to set the file modification time (this is the default).
--no-mtime — doesn't use the Last-modified header to set the file modification time.
--write-description — writes the video description to a .description file.
--write-info-json — writes the video metadata to a .info.json file.
--write-annotations — writes the video annotations to a .annotations.xml file.
--load-info-json FILE — a JSON file containing the video information (created with the --write-info-json option).
--cookies FILE — the file to read cookies from and dump the cookie jar in.

and that's only part 1 bestie, there's so much more coming 🌈

--cache-dir DIR — where in the filesystem youtube-dl is allowed to keep downloaded info permanently. default is $XDG_CACHE_HOME/youtube-dl or ~/.cache/youtube-dl. rn the only thing that gets cached is YouTube player files (the ones for videos with obfuscated signatures) but bestie that could change, no promises ✨
--no-cache-dir — turn filesystem caching all the way off, bye 💅
--rm-cache-dir — nuke every single filesystem cache file. all of them. gone 🗑️

🎀 Thumbnail Options 🎀

--write-thumbnail — write the thumbnail image to disk 🖼️
--write-all-thumbnails — write every thumbnail image format to disk, not just the one
--list-thumbnails — simulate and list out all the thumbnail formats that are available (no downloading, just looking 👀)

💬 Verbosity / Simulation Options 💬

-q, --quiet — activate quiet mode 🤫
--no-warnings — ignore warnings, pretend you didn't see them 🙈
-s, --simulate — do not download the video and do not write anything to disk. pure vibes, zero files
--skip-download — don't download the video (but other stuff can still happen)
-g, --get-url — simulate, quiet, but print the URL 📎
-e, --get-title — simulate, quiet, but print the title
--get-id — simulate, quiet, but print the id
--get-thumbnail — simulate, quiet, but print the thumbnail URL
--get-description — simulate, quiet, but print the video description
--get-duration — simulate, quiet, but print the video length
--get-filename — simulate, quiet, but print the output filename
--get-format — simulate, quiet, but print the output format
-j, --dump-json — simulate, quiet, but print JSON info 🧾. the available keys are described in "OUTPUT TEMPLATE", go look bestie
-J, --dump-single-json — simulate, quiet, but print JSON info for each command-line argument. and if the URL is a playlist? it dumps the whole playlist info on a single line. iconic behavior honestly 👑
--print-json — be quiet and print the video info as JSON, but note the video is still being downloaded — it's not a simulation, she's just not chatty 💅
--newline — output the progress bar as new lines instead of one line
--no-progress — do not print the progress bar at all
--console-title — display progress in the console titlebar ✨
-v, --verbose — print various debugging information, the whole lore 🗣️
--dump-pages — print downloaded pages encoded using base64 to debug problems. this is very verbose, you have been warned 😭
--write-pages — write downloaded intermediary pages to files in the current directory so you can debug problems
--print-traffic — display sent and read HTTP traffic 🚦
-C, --call-home — contact the youtube-dl server for debugging 📞
--no-call-home — do NOT contact the youtube-dl server for debugging

🛠️ Workarounds 🛠️

--encoding ENCODING — force the specified encoding (experimental, so like, she's trying something 🧪)
--no-check-certificate — suppress HTTPS certificate validation
--no-check-extensions — suppress file extension validation
--prefer-insecure — use an unencrypted connection to retrieve info about the video. currently supported only for YouTube
--user-agent UA — specify a custom user agent
--referer URL — specify a custom Referer: use this if the video access is restricted to one domain
--add-header FIELD:VALUE — specify a custom HTTP header and its value, separated by a colon ':'. you can use this option multiple times. NB — use --cookies rather than adding a Cookie header if its contents may be sensitive; data from a Cookie header will be sent to all domains, not just the one you intended 🚨
--bidi-workaround — work around terminals that lack bidirectional text support. requires a bidiv or fribidi executable in PATH
--sleep-interval SECONDS — number of seconds to sleep before each download when used alone, or the lower bound of a range for randomized sleep before each download (the minimum possible number of seconds to sleep) when used along with --max-sleep-interval 😴
--max-sleep-interval SECONDS — upper bound of a range for randomized sleep before each download (the maximum possible number of seconds to sleep). must only be used along with --min-sleep-interval

🎬 Video Format Options 🎬

-f, --format FORMAT — video format code, see "FORMAT SELECTION" for all the info you could ever want 📼
--all-formats — download every available video format
--prefer-free-formats — prefer free video formats unless a specific one is requested
-F, --list-formats — list all available formats of the requested videos
--youtube-skip-dash-manifest — do not download the DASH manifests and related data on YouTube videos
--merge-output-format FORMAT — if a merge is required (e.g. bestvideo+bestaudio), output to the given container format. one of mkv, mp4, ogg, webm, flv. ignored if no merge is required 💫

📝 Subtitle Options 📝

--write-sub — write subtitle file
--write-auto-sub — write automatically generated subtitle file (YouTube only)
--all-subs — download all the available subtitles of the video
--list-subs — list all available subtitles for the video
--sub-format FORMAT — subtitle format, accepts a formats preference, for example: "srt" or "ass/srt/best"
--sub-lang LANGS — languages of the subtitles to download (optional) separated by commas, use --list-subs for the available language tags 🌍

🔐 Authentication Options 🔐

-u, --username USERNAME — login with this account ID
-p, --password PASSWORD — account password. if you leave this option out, youtube-dl will ask you interactively 🫶
-2, --twofactor TWOFACTOR — two-factor authentication code
-n, --netrc — use .netrc authentication data
--video-password PASSWORD — video password (vimeo, youku)

📺 Adobe Pass Options 📺

--ap-mso MSO — Adobe Pass multiple-system operator (TV provider) identifier, use --ap-list-mso for a list of available MSOs
--ap-username USERNAME — multiple-system operator account login
--ap-password PASSWORD — multiple-system operator account password. if you leave this option out, youtube-dl will ask you interactively
--ap-list-mso — list all supported multiple-system operators

💅 Post-processing Options 💅

-x, --extract-audio — convert video files to audio-only files (requires ffmpeg/avconv and ffprobe/avprobe)
--audio-format FORMAT — specify audio format: "best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", "vorbis", or "wav"; "best" by default; no effect without -x
--audio-quality QUALITY — specify ffmpeg/avconv audio quality, insert a value between 0 (better) and 9 (worse) for VBR, or a specific bitrate like 128K (default 5)
--recode-video FORMAT — encode the video to another format if necessary (currently supported: mp4|flv|ogg|webm|mkv|avi)
--postprocessor-args ARGS — give these arguments to the postprocessor (if postprocessing is required)
-k, --keep-video — keep the video file on disk after the post-processing; the video is erased by default
--no-post-overwrites — do not overwrite post-processed files; the post-processed files are overwritten by default
--embed-subs — embed subtitles in the video (only for mp4, webm and mkv videos)
--embed-thumbnail — embed thumbnail in the audio as cover art 🎨
--add-metadata — write metadata to the video file
--metadata-from-title FORMAT — parse additional metadata like song title / artist from the video title. the format syntax is the same as --output. regular expressions with named capture groups may also be used. the parsed parameters replace existing values. examples, bestie:

--metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s"

matches a title like "Coldplay - Paradise". and with regex:

--metadata-from-title "(?P.+?)  - (?P.+)"

--xattrs — write metadata to the video file's xattrs (using dublin core and xdg standards)
--fixup POLICY — automatically correct known faults of the file. one of never (do nothing), warn (only emit a warning), detect_or_warn (the default; fix file if we can, warn otherwise)
--prefer-avconv — prefer avconv over ffmpeg for running the postprocessors
--prefer-ffmpeg — prefer ffmpeg over avconv for running the postprocessors (default)
--ffmpeg-location PATH — location of the ffmpeg/avconv binary; either the path to the binary or its containing directory
--exec CMD — execute a command on the file after downloading and post-processing, similar to find's -exec syntax. example:

--exec 'adb push {} /sdcard/Music/ && rm {}'

--convert-subs FORMAT — convert the subtitles to another format (currently supported: srt|ass|vtt|lrc)

CONFIGURATION 💖✨

okay so bestie, you can literally configure youtube-dl by placing any supported command line option into a configuration file. it's giving "set it and forget it" energy, periodt.

On Linux and macOS, the system wide configuration file is located at /etc/youtube-dl.conf and the user wide configuration file at ~/.config/youtube-dl/config. On Windows, the user wide configuration file locations are %APPDATA%\youtube-dl\config.txt or C:\Users\<user name>\youtube-dl.conf. no cap. Note that by default configuration file may not exist so you may need to create it yourself. slay.

For example, with the following configuration file youtube-dl will always extract the audio, not copy the mtime, use a proxy and save all videos under Movies directory in your home directory:

# Lines starting with # are comments

# Always extract audio
-x

# Do not copy the mtime
--no-mtime

# Use this proxy
--proxy 127.0.0.1:3128

# Save all videos under Movies directory in your home directory
-o ~/Movies/%(title)s.%(ext)s

Note that options in configuration file are just the same options aka switches used in regular command line calls thus there must be no whitespace after - or --, e.g. -o or --proxy but not - o or -- proxy. iykyk, the space will literally break it and you'll be sad. 😭

You can use --ignore-config if you want to disable the configuration file for a particular youtube-dl run.

You can also use --config-location if you want to use custom configuration file for a particular youtube-dl run.

Authentication with .netrc file 🔐

You may also want to configure automatic credentials storage for extractors that support authentication (by providing login and password with --username and --password) in order not to pass credentials as command line arguments on every youtube-dl execution and prevent tracking plain text passwords in the shell command history. you're welcome, bestie.

You can achieve this using a .netrc file on a per extractor basis. For that you will need to create a .netrc file in your $HOME and restrict permissions to read/write by only you:

touch $HOME/.netrc
chmod a-rwx,u+rw $HOME/.netrc

After that you can add credentials for an extractor in the following format, where extractor is the name of the extractor in lowercase:

machine <extractor> login <login> password <password>

For example:

machine youtube login myaccount@gmail.com password my_youtube_password
machine twitch login my_twitch_account_name password my_twitch_password

To activate authentication with the .netrc file you should pass --netrc to youtube-dl or place it in the configuration file. easy peasy.

On Windows you may also need to setup the %HOME% environment variable manually. For example:

set HOME=%USERPROFILE%

✨ OUTPUT TEMPLATE ✨

Okay bestie, so the -o option is how you tell youtube-dl what to name your files, and it's lowkey one of the most powerful things in this whole entire tool. slay 💅

tl;dr: navigate me to examples. 👀

So the basic vibe is: if you're just downloading one single file, you don't even gotta set any template arguments, like in youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "https://some/video". But listen — it can also contain special sequences that get swapped out when each video downloads. And those special sequences can be formatted according to python string formatting operations. So like, %(NAME)s or %(NAME)05d. To be super clear: that's a percent symbol, followed by a name in parentheses, followed by formatting operations. the way that formatting just hits different ✨

The allowed names along with sequence type are, and I'm listing every single one because we don't skip, periodt:

id (string): Video identifier
title (string): Video title
url (string): Video URL
ext (string): Video filename extension
alt_title (string): A secondary title of the video
display_id (string): An alternative identifier for the video
uploader (string): Full name of the video uploader
license (string): License name the video is licensed under
creator (string): The creator of the video
release_date (string): The date (YYYYMMDD) when the video was released
timestamp (numeric): UNIX timestamp of the moment the video became available
upload_date (string): Video upload date (YYYYMMDD)
uploader_id (string): Nickname or id of the video uploader
channel (string): Full name of the channel the video is uploaded on
channel_id (string): Id of the channel
location (string): Physical location where the video was filmed
duration (numeric): Length of the video in seconds
view_count (numeric): How many users have watched the video on the platform
like_count (numeric): Number of positive ratings of the video
dislike_count (numeric): Number of negative ratings of the video
repost_count (numeric): Number of reposts of the video
average_rating (numeric): Average rating give by users, the scale used depends on the webpage
comment_count (numeric): Number of comments on the video
age_limit (numeric): Age restriction for the video (years)
is_live (boolean): Whether this video is a live stream or a fixed-length video
start_time (numeric): Time in seconds where the reproduction should start, as specified in the URL
end_time (numeric): Time in seconds where the reproduction should end, as specified in the URL
format (string): A human-readable description of the format
format_id (string): Format code specified by --format
format_note (string): Additional info about the format
width (numeric): Width of the video
height (numeric): Height of the video
resolution (string): Textual description of width and height
tbr (numeric): Average bitrate of audio and video in KBit/s
abr (numeric): Average audio bitrate in KBit/s
acodec (string): Name of the audio codec in use
asr (numeric): Audio sampling rate in Hertz
vbr (numeric): Average video bitrate in KBit/s
fps (numeric): Frame rate
vcodec (string): Name of the video codec in use
container (string): Name of the container format
filesize (numeric): The number of bytes, if known in advance
filesize_approx (numeric): An estimate for the number of bytes
protocol (string): The protocol that will be used for the actual download
extractor (string): Name of the extractor
extractor_key (string): Key name of the extractor
epoch (numeric): Unix epoch when creating the file
autonumber (numeric): Number that will be increased with each download, starting at --autonumber-start
playlist (string): Name or id of the playlist that contains the video
playlist_index (numeric): Index of the video in the playlist padded with leading zeros according to the total length of the playlist
playlist_id (string): Playlist identifier
playlist_title (string): Playlist title
playlist_uploader (string): Full name of the playlist uploader
playlist_uploader_id (string): Nickname or id of the playlist uploader

Available for the video that belongs to some logical chapter or section 🎬:

chapter (string): Name or title of the chapter the video belongs to
chapter_number (numeric): Number of the chapter the video belongs to
chapter_id (string): Id of the chapter the video belongs to

Available for the video that is an episode of some series or programme 📺:

series (string): Title of the series or programme the video episode belongs to
season (string): Title of the season the video episode belongs to
season_number (numeric): Number of the season the video episode belongs to
season_id (string): Id of the season the video episode belongs to
episode (string): Title of the video episode
episode_number (numeric): Number of the video episode within a season
episode_id (string): Id of the video episode

Available for the media that is a track or a part of a music album 🎵:

track (string): Title of the track
track_number (numeric): Number of the track within an album or a disc
track_id (string): Id of the track
artist (string): Artist(s) of the track
genre (string): Genre(s) of the track
album (string): Title of the album the track belongs to
album_type (string): Type of the album
album_artist (string): List of all artists appeared on the album
disc_number (numeric): Number of the disc or other physical medium the track belongs to
release_year (numeric): Year (YYYY) when the album was released

So each one of those sequences, when you reference it in an output template, gets replaced by the actual value corresponding to that sequence name. iconic behavior honestly. But heads up bestie — some of the sequences are not guaranteed to be present, because they depend on the metadata that a particular extractor managed to get. Those sad missing ones get replaced with the placeholder value you provide with --output-na-placeholder (which defaults to NA, just so you know).

For example, for -o %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s and an mp4 video with title youtube-dl test video and id BaW_jenozKcj, this will result in a youtube-dl test video-BaW_jenozKcj.mp4 file created in the current directory. ✨

For numeric sequences you can use numeric related formatting, like %(view_count)05d will give you a string with the view count padded with zeros up to 5 characters, like in 00042. the zero-padding is giving organized queen energy 💅

Output templates can ALSO contain arbitrary hierarchical path, e.g. -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' which will result in downloading each video in a directory corresponding to this path template. And the best part? Any missing directory gets automatically created for you. no manual mkdir needed, we love to see it 🦋

To use percent literals in an output template use %%. To output to stdout use -o -.

The current default template is %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s.

In some cases, you don't want special characters such as 中, spaces, or &, like when you're transferring the downloaded filename to a Windows system, or the filename through an 8bit-unsafe channel. In these cases, add the --restrict-filenames flag to get a shorter title. we stay safe out here 💀

🎀 Output template and Windows batch files 🎀

Okay so if you are using an output template inside a Windows batch file, then you must escape plain percent characters (%) by doubling them, so that -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" should become -o "%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s".

But — and this is the important part — you should not touch %'s that are not plain characters, e.g. environment variables for expansion should stay intact: -o "C:\%HOMEPATH%\Desktop\%%(title)s.%%(ext)s". don't you dare touch those env vars, they're doing their job 🙈

🌸 Output template examples 🌸

Note that on Windows you may need to use double quotes instead of single.

$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' BaW_jenozKc
youtube-dl test video ''_ä↭𝕐.mp4    # All kinds of weird characters

$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' BaW_jenozKc --restrict-filenames
youtube-dl_test_video_.mp4          # A simple file name

# Download YouTube playlist videos in separate directory indexed by video order in a playlist
$ youtube-dl -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re

# Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory:
$ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists

# Download Udemy course keeping each chapter in separate directory under MyVideos directory in your home
$ youtube-dl -u user -p password -o '~/MyVideos/%(playlist)s/%(chapter_number)s - %(chapter)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.udemy.com/java-tutorial/

# Download entire series season keeping each series and each season in separate directory under C:/MyVideos
$ youtube-dl -o "C:/MyVideos/%(series)s/%(season_number)s - %(season)s/%(episode_number)s - %(episode)s.%(ext)s" https://videomore.ru/kino_v_detalayah/5_sezon/367617

# Stream the video being downloaded to stdout
$ youtube-dl -o - BaW_jenozKc

look at all those templates just doing their thing, we are so back 💖

✨ FORMAT SELECTION ✨

okay bestie so by default youtube-dl is out here trying to give you the best available quality — like, if that's what you want, you literally don't have to pass any special options at all, it just guesses it for you by default. main character behavior tbh 💅

But sometimes you want a different format, right? Like when your connection is slow or doing that intermittent thing 😭. The key mechanism for this is the so-called format selection, and with it you can explicitly specify the format you want, pick formats based on some criterion (or criteria), set up precedence, and so much more. it's giving powerful.

The general syntax for format selection is --format FORMAT, or the shorter -f FORMAT, where FORMAT is a selector expression — i.e. an expression that describes the format or formats you'd like to download.

tl;dr: navigate me to examples. 🦋

The simplest case is requesting one specific format — for example with -f 22 you download the format whose format code equals 22. You can get the list of available format codes for a particular video using --list-formats or -F. Note that these format codes are extractor specific (iykyk).

You can also use a file extension to download the best quality format of that particular file extension served as a single file. Currently supported: 3gp, aac, flv, m4a, mp3, mp4, ogg, wav, webm. So like -f webm downloads the best quality format with the webm extension served as a single file. periodt.

You can also use special names to select particular edge case formats:

best: Select the best quality format represented by a single file with video and audio.
worst: Select the worst quality format represented by a single file with video and audio.
bestvideo: Select the best quality video-only format (e.g. DASH video). May not be available.
worstvideo: Select the worst quality video-only format. May not be available.
bestaudio: Select the best quality audio only-format. May not be available.
worstaudio: Select the worst quality audio only-format. May not be available.

For example, to download the worst quality video-only format you can use -f worstvideo. 🫠

If you want to download multiple videos and they don't have the same formats available, you can specify the order of preference using slashes. Note that slash is left-associative — i.e. formats on the left hand side are preferred. So -f 22/17/18 will download format 22 if it's available, otherwise it'll download format 17 if it's available, otherwise it'll download format 18 if it's available, otherwise it'll complain that no suitable formats are available for download. 💀

If you want to download several formats of the same video, use a comma as a separator, e.g. -f 22,17,18 downloads all three of those formats (of course if they're available). Or a more sophisticated example combined with the precedence feature: -f 136/137/mp4/bestvideo,140/m4a/bestaudio. slay.

You can also filter the video formats by putting a condition in brackets, as in -f "best[height=720]" (or -f "[filesize>10M]").

The following numeric meta fields can be used with comparisons <, <=, >, >=, = (equals), != (not equals):

filesize: The number of bytes, if known in advance
width: Width of the video, if known
height: Height of the video, if known
tbr: Average bitrate of audio and video in KBit/s
abr: Average audio bitrate in KBit/s
vbr: Average video bitrate in KBit/s
asr: Audio sampling rate in Hertz
fps: Frame rate

Also filtering work for comparisons = (equals), ^= (starts with), $= (ends with), *= (contains) and the following string meta fields:

ext: File extension
acodec: Name of the audio codec in use
vcodec: Name of the video codec in use
container: Name of the container format
protocol: The protocol that will be used for the actual download, lower-case (http, https, rtsp, rtmp, rtmpe, mms, f4m, ism, http_dash_segments, m3u8, or m3u8_native)
format_id: A short description of the format
language: Language code

Any string comparison may be prefixed with negation ! in order to produce an opposite comparison, e.g. !*= (does not contain). 🌈

Note that none of the aforementioned meta fields are guaranteed to be present, since this solely depends on the metadata obtained by the particular extractor — i.e. the metadata offered by the video hoster.

Formats for which the value is not known are excluded unless you put a question mark (?) after the operator. You can combine format filters, so -f "[height <=? 720][tbr>500]" selects up to 720p videos (or videos where the height is not known) with a bitrate of at least 500 KBit/s. obsessed. ✨

You can merge the video and audio of two formats into a single file using -f <video-format>+<audio-format> (requires ffmpeg or avconv installed). For example -f bestvideo+bestaudio will download the best video-only format, the best audio-only format, and mux them together with ffmpeg/avconv. 💖

Format selectors can also be grouped using parentheses — for example if you want to download the best mp4 and webm formats with a height lower than 480 you can use -f '(mp4,webm)[height<480]'. iconic.

Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26, youtube-dl uses -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as the 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. best is also needed for videos that don't come from YouTube, because they don't provide the audio and video in two different files. If you want to only download some DASH formats (for example if you are not interested in getting videos with a resolution higher than 1080p), you can add -f bestvideo[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best to your configuration file. Note that if you use youtube-dl to stream to stdout (and most likely to pipe it to your media player then), i.e. you explicitly specify output template as -o -, youtube-dl still uses -f best format selection in order to start content delivery immediately to your player and not to wait until bestvideo and bestaudio are downloaded and muxed. 🎀

If you want to preserve the old format selection behavior (prior to youtube-dl 2015.04.26), i.e. you want to download the best available quality media served as a single file, you should explicitly specify your choice with -f best. You may want to add it to the configuration file so you don't have to type it every time you run youtube-dl. 🫶

Format selection examples

Note that on Windows you may need to use double quotes instead of single.

# Download best mp4 format available or any other best if no mp4 available
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best'

# Download best format available but no better than 480p
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[height<=480]+bestaudio/best[height<=480]'

# Download best video only format but no bigger than 50 MB
$ youtube-dl -f 'best[filesize<50M]'

# Download best format available via direct link over HTTP/HTTPS protocol
$ youtube-dl -f '(bestvideo+bestaudio/best)[protocol^=http]'

# Download the best video format and the best audio format without merging them
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo,bestaudio' -o '%(title)s.f%(format_id)s.%(ext)s'

Note that in the last example, an output template is recommended as bestvideo and bestaudio may have the same file name. 🙈

🦋 VIDEO SELECTION 🦋

Videos can be filtered by their upload date using the options --date, --datebefore or --dateafter. They accept dates in two formats:

Absolute dates: Dates in the format YYYYMMDD.
Relative dates: Dates in the format (now|today)[+-][0-9](day|week|month|year)(s)?

Examples:

# Download only the videos uploaded in the last 6 months
$ youtube-dl --dateafter now-6months

# Download only the videos uploaded on January 1, 1970
$ youtube-dl --date 19700101

$ # Download only the videos uploaded in the 200x decade
$ youtube-dl --dateafter 20000101 --datebefore 20091231

💜 FAQ 💜

How do I update youtube-dl?

If you've followed our manual installation instructions, you can simply run youtube-dl -U (or, on Linux, sudo youtube-dl -U). 🫶

If you have used pip, a simple sudo pip install -U youtube-dl is sufficient to update.

If you have installed youtube-dl using a package manager like apt-get or yum, use the standard system update mechanism to update. Note that distribution packages are often outdated. As a rule of thumb, youtube-dl releases at least once a month, and often weekly or even daily. Simply go to https://yt-dl.org to find out the current version. Unfortunately, there is nothing we youtube-dl developers can do if your distribution serves a really outdated version. You can (and should) complain to your distribution in their bugtracker or support forum. 💅

As a last resort, you can also uninstall the version installed by your package manager and follow our manual installation instructions. For that, remove the distribution's package, with a line like

sudo apt-get remove -y youtube-dl

Afterwards, simply follow our manual installation instructions:

sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
hash -r

Again, from then on you'll be able to update with sudo youtube-dl -U. ✨

youtube-dl is extremely slow to start on Windows

Add a file exclusion for youtube-dl.exe in Windows Defender settings. 🦋

I'm getting an error Unable to extract OpenGraph title on YouTube playlists

YouTube changed their playlist format in March 2014 and later on, so you'll need at least youtube-dl 2014.07.25 to download all YouTube videos. 😭

If you have installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball, please use that to update. Note that Ubuntu packages do not seem to get updated anymore. Since we are not affiliated with Ubuntu, there is little we can do. Feel free to report bugs to the Ubuntu packaging people — all they have to do is update the package to a somewhat recent version. See above for a way to update. 💀

I'm getting an error when trying to use output template: error: using output template conflicts with using title, video ID or auto number

Make sure you are not using -o with any of these options — -t, --title, --id, -A or --auto-number — set in command line or in a configuration file. Remove the latter if any. 🎀

💅 Do I always have to pass `-citw`?

Bestie, no. 💖 By default, youtube-dl is designed to have the best options already on — and lowkey, if you've got a genuinely convincing case that they should be different, the move is to file an issue and explain it. So copying long option strings off random webpages? Unnecessary, and sometimes actively harmful. 🙈 Of the whole -citw crew, the only one that's regularly useful is -i.

Can you please put the `-b` option back? 🥺

Okay so most people asking this aren't aware that youtube-dl now defaults to downloading the highest available quality as reported by YouTube, which is gonna be 1080p or 720p in some cases — so you literally don't need -b anymore. 👑

For some specific videos though, maybe YouTube doesn't report them as available in that one high-quality format you're craving. In that case just request it directly with the -f option and youtube-dl will try to download it. Periodt.

I get HTTP error 402 when trying to download a video. What's this? 😭

Apparently YouTube requires you to pass a CAPTCHA test if you download too much. They're considering providing a way to let you solve the CAPTCHA, but at the moment, your best course of action is:

Point a web browser to the youtube URL 🌐
Solve the CAPTCHA ✅
Restart youtube-dl 🔁

Do I need any other programs? 🧚

youtube-dl works fine on its own on most sites. However, if you want to convert video/audio, you'll need avconv or ffmpeg. ✨

On some sites — most notably YouTube — videos can be retrieved in a higher quality format without sound. youtube-dl will detect whether avconv/ffmpeg is present and automatically pick the best option. 💅

Videos or video formats streamed via RTMP protocol can only be downloaded when rtmpdump is installed.
Downloading MMS and RTSP videos requires either mplayer or mpv to be installed.

I have downloaded a video but how can I play it? 🎬

Once the video is fully downloaded, use any video player, such as mpv, vlc or mplayer. That's it, that's the answer. 💖

I extracted a video URL with `-g`, but it does not play on another machine / in my web browser 🫠

It depends a lot on the service, bestie. In many cases, requests for the video (to download/play it) must come from the same IP address and with the same cookies and/or HTTP headers.

Use the --cookies option to write the required cookies into a file, and advise your downloader to read cookies from that file.
Some sites also require a common user agent to be used — use --dump-user-agent to see the one in use by youtube-dl.
You can also get necessary cookies and HTTP headers from JSON output obtained with --dump-json.

It may be beneficial to use IPv6; in some cases, the restrictions are only applied to IPv4. Some services (sometimes only for a subset of videos) do not restrict the video URL by IP address, cookie, or user-agent — but these are the exception rather than the rule. 😔

Please bear in mind that some URL protocols are not supported by browsers out of the box, including RTMP. If you are using -g, your own downloader must support these as well.

If you want to play the video on a machine that is not running youtube-dl, you can relay the video content from the machine that does run youtube-dl. You can use -o - to let youtube-dl stream a video to stdout, or simply allow the player to download the files written by youtube-dl in turn. 🌈

`ERROR: no fmt_url_map or conn information found in video info` 💀

YouTube switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl. 👆

`ERROR: unable to download video` 😵

YouTube requires an additional signature since September 2012 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl. (Spotting a pattern here? 🎀)

Video URL contains an ampersand and I'm getting some strange output `[1] 2839` or `'v' is not recognized as an internal or external command` 🤨

That's actually the output from your shell. Since ampersand is one of the special shell characters, it's interpreted by the shell, preventing you from passing the whole URL to youtube-dl. To disable your shell from interpreting the ampersands (or any other special characters) you have to either put the whole URL in quotes or escape them with a backslash — which approach will work depends on your shell.

For example, if your URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc you should end up with following command:

youtube-dl 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc'

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4\&v=BaW_jenozKc

For Windows you have to use the double quotes:

youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc"

`ExtractorError: Could not find JS function u'OF'` 🫥

In February 2015, the new YouTube player contained a character sequence in a string that was misinterpreted by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl. ✨

`HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests` or `402: Payment Required` 😤

These two error codes indicate that the service is blocking your IP address because of overuse. Usually this is a soft block, meaning you can gain access again after solving a CAPTCHA.

So: just open a browser, solve a CAPTCHA the service suggests you, and after that pass cookies to youtube-dl. 🍪

Note that if your machine has multiple external IPs then you should also pass exactly the same IP you've used for solving CAPTCHA with --source-address. Also you may need to pass a User-Agent HTTP header of your browser with --user-agent.

If this is not the case (no CAPTCHA suggested to solve by the service) then you can contact the service and ask them to unblock your IP address — or, if you have acquired a whitelisted IP address already, use the --proxy or --source-address options to select another IP address. 💫

`SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character` 🐍

The error

File "youtube-dl", line 2
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x93' ...

means you're using an outdated version of Python. Please update to Python 2.6 or 2.7. 🫶

What is this binary file? Where has the code gone? 👀

Since June 2012 (#342) youtube-dl is packed as an executable zipfile. Simply unzip it (might need renaming to youtube-dl.zip first on some systems) or clone the git repository, as laid out above.

If you modify the code, you can run it by executing the __main__.py file. To recompile the executable, run make youtube-dl. 🔥

The exe throws an error due to missing `MSVCR100.dll` 🪟

To run the exe you need to install first the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package (x86).

On Windows, how should I set up `ffmpeg` and `youtube-dl`? Where should I put the exe files? 🎀

If you put youtube-dl and ffmpeg in the same directory that you're running the command from, it will work — but that's rather cumbersome. 🙄

To make a different directory work — either for ffmpeg, or for youtube-dl, or for both — simply:

Create the directory (say, C:\bin, or C:\Users\<User name>\bin)
Put all the executables directly in there
Set your PATH environment variable to include that directory

From then on, after restarting your shell, you will be able to access both youtube-dl and ffmpeg (and youtube-dl will be able to find ffmpeg) by simply typing youtube-dl or ffmpeg, no matter what directory you're in. Iconic. 👑

How do I put downloads into a specific folder? 📁

Use the -o to specify an output template, for example:

-o "/home/user/videos/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s"

If you want this for all of your downloads, put the option into your configuration file. 💅

How do I download a video starting with a `-`? 🙃

Either prepend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= or separate the ID from the options with --:

youtube-dl -- -wNyEUrxzFU
youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wNyEUrxzFU"

How do I pass cookies to `youtube-dl`? 🍪✨

Use the --cookies option, for example --cookies /path/to/cookies/file.txt.

In order to extract cookies from browser, use any conforming browser extension for exporting cookies. For example, Get cookies.txt LOCALLY (for Chrome) or cookies.txt (for Firefox).

Note that the cookies file must be in Mozilla/Netscape format and the first line of the cookies file must be either # HTTP Cookie File or # Netscape HTTP Cookie File.

Make sure you have correct newline format in the cookies file and convert newlines if necessary to correspond with your OS — namely CRLF (\r\n) for Windows and LF (\n) for Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, macOS, etc.). HTTP Error 400: Bad Request when using --cookies is a good sign of invalid newline format. 😭

Passing cookies to youtube-dl is a good way to workaround login when a particular extractor does not implement it explicitly. Another use case is working around CAPTCHA some websites require you to solve in particular cases in order to get access (e.g. YouTube, CloudFlare). 🦋

How do I stream directly to media player? 📺

You will first need to tell youtube-dl to stream media to stdout with -o -, and also tell your media player to read from stdin (it must be capable of this for streaming) and then pipe former to latter.

For example, streaming to vlc can be achieved with:

youtube-dl -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc -

How do I download only new videos from a playlist? 🔁

Use the download-archive feature. With this feature you should initially download the complete playlist with --download-archive /path/to/download/archive/file.txt — that will record identifiers of all the videos in a special file. Each subsequent run with the same --download-archive will download only new videos and skip all videos that have been downloaded before.

Note that only successful downloads are recorded in the file.

For example, at first,

youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

will download the complete PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re playlist and create a file archive.txt. Each subsequent run will only download new videos if any:

youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

Should I add `--hls-prefer-native` into my config? 🤔

When youtube-dl detects an HLS video, it can download it either with the built-in downloader or ffmpeg. Since many HLS streams are slightly invalid and ffmpeg/youtube-dl each handle some invalid cases better than the other, there is an option to switch the downloader if needed.

When youtube-dl knows that one particular downloader works better for a given website, that downloader will be picked. Otherwise, youtube-dl will pick the best downloader for general compatibility, which at the moment happens to be ffmpeg. This choice may change in future versions of youtube-dl, with improvements of the built-in downloader and/or ffmpeg. 🌸

In particular, the generic extractor — the one that springs into action when your website isn't in the list of supported sites by youtube-dl — cannot mandate one specific downloader.

If you drop either --hls-prefer-native or --hls-prefer-ffmpeg into your configuration, a different subset of videos will fail to download correctly. Instead, it's so much better to file an issue or a pull request that spills the tea on why the native or the ffmpeg HLS downloader is the better choice for your use case. Bestie, that's the move. 💅

🎀 Can you add support for this anime video site, or site which shows current movies for free?

As a matter of policy (as well as legality), youtube-dl does not include support for services that specialize in infringing copyright. As a rule of thumb: if you can't easily find a video that the service is quite obviously allowed to distribute (like, one that's been uploaded by the creator, the creator's distributor, or is published under a free license), the service is probably unfit for inclusion into youtube-dl.

A note on the service saying they don't host the infringing content, they just link to those who do? That's actually evidence that the service should not be included into youtube-dl. Same energy for any DMCA note when the whole front page of the service is filled with videos they are not allowed to distribute. A "fair use" note is equally unconvincing if the service shows copyright-protected videos in full without authorization. Like, no cap. 🚫

Support requests for services that do purchase the rights to distribute their content are perfectly fine though. If in doubt, you can simply include a source that mentions the legitimate purchase of content. 🫶

💜 How can I speed up work on my issue?

(Also known as: Help, my important issue not being solved!) The youtube-dl core developer team is quite small. While we do our best to solve as many issues as possible, sometimes that can take quite a while. To speed up your issue, here's what you can do:

First of all, please do report the issue at our issue tracker. That allows us to coordinate all efforts by users and developers, and serves as a unified point. Unfortunately, the youtube-dl project has grown too large to use personal email as an effective communication channel. 📬

Please read the bug reporting instructions below. A lot of bugs lack all the necessary information. If you can, offer proxy, VPN, or shell access to the youtube-dl developers. If you are able to, test the issue from multiple computers in multiple countries to exclude local censorship or misconfiguration issues.

If nobody is interested in solving your issue, you are welcome to take matters into your own hands and submit a pull request (or coerce/pay somebody else to do so). 💪

Feel free to bump the issue from time to time by writing a small comment ("Issue is still present in youtube-dl version ...from France, but fixed from Belgium"), but please not more than once a month. Please do not declare your issue as important or urgent.

🦋 How can I detect whether a given URL is supported by youtube-dl?

For one, have a look at the list of supported sites. Note that it can sometimes happen that the site changes its URL scheme (say, from https://example.com/video/1234567 to https://example.com/v/1234567 ) and youtube-dl reports an URL of a service in that list as unsupported. In that case, simply report a bug. 🐛

It is not possible to detect whether a URL is supported or not. That's because youtube-dl contains a generic extractor which matches all URLs. You may be tempted to disable, exclude, or remove the generic extractor, but the generic extractor not only allows users to extract videos from lots of websites that embed a video from another service, but may also be used to extract video from a service that it's hosting itself. Therefore, we neither recommend nor support disabling, excluding, or removing the generic extractor. 🙅‍♀️

If you want to find out whether a given URL is supported, simply call youtube-dl with it. If you get no videos back, chances are the URL is either not referring to a video or unsupported. You can find out which by examining the output (if you run youtube-dl on the console) or catching an UnsupportedError exception if you run it from a Python program. ✨

🌸 Why do I need to go through that much red tape when filing bugs?

Before we had the issue template, despite our extensive bug reporting instructions, about 80% of the issue reports we got were useless — for instance because people used ancient versions hundreds of releases old, because of simple syntactic errors (not in youtube-dl but in general shell usage), because the problem was already reported multiple times before, because people did not actually read an error message, even if it said "please install ffmpeg", because people did not mention the URL they were trying to download, and many more simple, easy-to-avoid problems, many of whom were totally unrelated to youtube-dl. 😭

youtube-dl is an open-source project manned by too few volunteers, so we'd rather spend time fixing bugs where we are certain none of those simple problems apply, and where we can be reasonably confident to be able to reproduce the issue without asking the reporter repeatedly. As such, the output of youtube-dl -v YOUR_URL_HERE is really all that's required to file an issue. The issue template also guides you through some basic steps you can do, such as checking that your version of youtube-dl is current. ⭐

👑 DEVELOPER INSTRUCTIONS 👑

Most users do not need to build youtube-dl and can download the builds or get them from their distribution.

To run youtube-dl as a developer, you don't need to build anything either. Simply execute

python -m youtube_dl

To run the test, simply invoke your favorite test runner, or execute a test file directly; any of the following work:

python -m unittest discover
python test/test_download.py
nosetests

For Python versions 3.6 and later, you can use pynose to implement nosetests. The original nose has not been upgraded for 3.10 and later.

See item 6 of new extractor tutorial for how to run extractor specific test cases.

If you want to create a build of youtube-dl yourself, you'll need

python
make (only GNU make is supported)
pandoc
zip
nosetests

🌈 Adding support for a new site

If you want to add support for a new site, first of all make sure this site is not dedicated to copyright infringement. youtube-dl does not support such sites, thus pull requests adding support for them will be rejected.

After you have ensured this site is distributing its content legally, you can follow this quick list (assuming your service is called yourextractor):

Fork this repository
Check out the source code with:

git clone git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/youtube-dl.git

Start a new git branch with

cd youtube-dl
git checkout -b yourextractor

Start with this simple template and save it to youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py:

# coding: utf-8
from __future__ import unicode_literals

from .common import InfoExtractor

class YourExtractorIE(InfoExtractor):
    _VALID_URL = r'https?://(?:www\.)?yourextractor\.com/watch/(?P<id>[0-9]+)'
    _TEST = {
        'url': 'https://yourextractor.com/watch/42',
        'md5': 'TODO: md5 sum of the first 10241 bytes of the video file (use --test)',
        'info_dict': {
            'id': '42',
            'ext': 'mp4',
            'title': 'Video title goes here',
            'thumbnail': r're:^https?://.*\.jpg$',
            # TODO more properties, either as:
            # * A value
            # * MD5 checksum; start the string with md5:
            # * A regular expression; start the string with re:
            # * Any Python type (for example int or float)
        }
    }

    def _real_extract(self, url):
        video_id = self._match_id(url)
        webpage = self._download_webpage(url, video_id)

        # TODO more code goes here, for example ...
        title = self._html_search_regex(r'<h1>(.+?)</h1>', webpage, 'title')

        return {
            'id': video_id,
            'title': title,
            'description': self._og_search_description(webpage),
            'uploader': self._search_regex(r'<div[^>]+id="uploader"[^>]*>([^<]+)<', webpage, 'uploader', fatal=False),
            # TODO more properties (see youtube_dl/extractor/common.py)
        }

Add an import in youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py.
Run python test/test_download.py TestDownload.test_YourExtractor. This should fail at first, but you can continually re-run it until you're done. If you decide to add more than one test (actually, test case) then rename _TEST to _TESTS and make it into a list of dictionaries. The tests will then be named TestDownload.test_YourExtractor, TestDownload.test_YourExtractor_1, TestDownload.test_YourExtractor_2, etc. Note:
- the test names use the extractor class name without the trailing IE
- tests with only_matching key in test's dict are not counted.
Have a look at youtube_dl/extractor/common.py for possible helper methods and a detailed description of what your extractor should and may return. Add tests and code for as many as you want.
Make sure your code follows youtube-dl coding conventions and check the code with flake8:

$ flake8 youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py

Make sure your code works under all Python versions claimed supported by youtube-dl, namely 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2+.
When the tests pass, add the new files and commit them and push the result, like this:

$ git add youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py
$ git add youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py
$ git commit -m '[yourextractor] Add new extractor'
$ git push origin yourextractor

Finally, create a pull request. We'll then review and merge it.

In any case, thank you very much for your contributions! 🫶💖

✨ youtube-dl coding conventions ✨

This section introduces guidelines for writing idiomatic, robust and future-proof extractor code. 🌱

okay so real talk bestie 💀 — extractors are, like, fragile by nature, because they're completely at the mercy of the layout of the source data handed to them by 3rd party media hosters that are out of your control, and that layout? it changes. constantly. chaotic energy 🦋

So as an extractor implementer, your job is not just writing code that pulls media links and metadata correctly — you also gotta minimize how much you depend on the source's layout, and honestly even write code that foresees potential future changes and is ready for them. This matters so much, because it lets an extractor not break on minor layout changes, which keeps old youtube-dl versions working. ✨

And yeah, sure, this breakage issue is easily fixed by emitting a new version of youtube-dl with a fix incorporated, but every single previous version becomes broken in all the repositories and distros' packages that might not be so prompt in fetching the update from us. And needless to say, some non rolling release distros may never receive an update at all. 😭

🧸 Mandatory and optional metafields 🧸

For extraction to work, youtube-dl relies on metadata your extractor extracts and provides to youtube-dl, expressed by an information dictionary — or, as the girlies say, simply info dict. 💅

Only these meta fields in the info dict are considered mandatory for a successful extraction process by youtube-dl:

id (media identifier)
title (media title)
url (media download URL) or formats

Lowkey, only the last option is technically mandatory — because if you can't figure out the download location of the media, the extraction does not make any sense. 🙈 But by convention youtube-dl also treats id and title as mandatory. So those metafields above are the critical data that extraction is meaningless without, and if any of them fail to be extracted, then the extractor is considered completely broken. 💀

Any field apart from those is optional. That means extraction should be tolerant to situations when sources for these fields can potentially be unavailable (even if they're always available at the moment) and future-proof so it doesn't break the extraction of general purpose mandatory fields. 🫶

Example ✨

Say you have some source dictionary meta that you've fetched as JSON with an HTTP request and it has a key summary:

meta = self._download_json(url, video_id)

Assume at this point meta's layout is:

{
    ...
    "summary": "some fancy summary text",
    ...
}

Assume you want to extract summary and put it into the resulting info dict as description. Since description is an optional meta field, you should be ready for that key possibly being missing from the meta dict, so you should extract it like:

description = meta.get('summary')  # correct

and not like:

description = meta['summary']  # incorrect

The latter will break the extraction process with KeyError if summary disappears from meta at some later time. But with the former approach, extraction will just go ahead with description set to None, which is perfectly fine (remember, None is equivalent to the absence of data). 💖

Similarly, you should pass fatal=False when extracting optional data from a webpage with _search_regex, _html_search_regex or similar methods, for instance:

description = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+id="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)<',
    webpage, 'description', fatal=False)

With fatal set to False, if _search_regex fails to extract description it will emit a warning and continue extraction. 🎀

You can also pass default=<some fallback value>, for example:

description = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+id="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)<',
    webpage, 'description', default=None)

On failure this code will silently continue the extraction with description set to None. That's useful for metafields that may or may not be present. 🌸

🛟 Provide fallbacks 🛟

When extracting metadata, try to do so from multiple sources. For example, if title is present in several places, try extracting from at least some of them. This makes it more future-proof in case some of the sources become unavailable. 🦋

Example ✨

Say meta from the previous example has a title and you're about to extract it. Since title is a mandatory meta field, you should end up with something like:

title = meta['title']

If title disappears from meta in the future because of some changes on the hoster's side, the extraction would fail since title is mandatory. That's expected. 😌

Assume that you have some another source you can extract title from, for example og:title HTML meta of a webpage. In this case you can provide a fallback scenario:

title = meta.get('title') or self._og_search_title(webpage)

This code will try to extract from meta first, and if it fails it will try extracting og:title from a webpage. slay ✨

🔍 Regular expressions 🔍

Don't capture groups you don't use 💅

A capturing group must be an indication that it's used somewhere in the code. Any group that is not used must be non capturing. periodt.

Example ✨

Don't capture the id attribute name here, since you can't use it for anything anyway.

Correct:

r'(?:id|ID)=(?P<id>\d+)'

Incorrect:

r'(id|ID)=(?P<id>\d+)'

Make regular expressions relaxed and flexible 🌸

When using regular expressions, try to write them fuzzy, relaxed and flexible — skipping insignificant parts that are more likely to change, allowing both single and double quotes for quoted values, and so on. 🎀

Example ✨

Say you need to extract title from the following HTML code:

<span style="position: absolute; left: 910px; width: 90px; float: right; z-index: 9999;" class="title">some fancy title</span>

The code for that task should look similar to:

title = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+class="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)', webpage, 'title')

Or even better:

title = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+class=(["\'])title\1[^>]*>(?P<title>[^<]+)',
    webpage, 'title', group='title')

Note how you tolerate potential changes in the style attribute's value, or a switch from using double quotes to single for the class attribute. 👑

The code definitely should not look like:

title = self._search_regex(
    r'<span style="position: absolute; left: 910px; width: 90px; float: right; z-index: 9999;" class="title">(.*?)</span>',
    webpage, 'title', group='title')

📏 Long lines policy 📏

There is a soft limit to keep lines of code under 80 characters long. This means it should be respected if possible, and if it does not make readability and code maintenance worse. 💜

For example, you should never split long string literals like URLs or some other often copied entities over multiple lines just to fit this limit:

Correct:

'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZTN594JQw&list=PLMYEtVRpaqY00V9W81Cwmzp6N6vZqfUKD4'

Incorrect:

'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZTN594JQw&list='
'PLMYEtVRpaqY00V9W81Cwmzp6N6vZqfUKD4'

🌱 Inline values 🌱

Extracting variables is acceptable for reducing code duplication and improving readability of complex expressions. However, you should avoid extracting variables used only once and moving them to opposite parts of the extractor file, which makes reading the linear flow difficult. 😭

Example ✨

Correct:

title = self._html_search_regex(r'<title>([^<]+)</title>', webpage, 'title')

Incorrect:

TITLE_RE = r'<title>([^<]+)</title>'
# ...some lines of code...
title = self._html_search_regex(TITLE_RE, webpage, 'title')

🧚 Collapse fallbacks 🧚

Multiple fallback values can quickly become unwieldy. Collapse multiple fallback values into a single expression via a list of patterns. 🦋

Example ✨

Good:

description = self._html_search_meta(
    ['og:description', 'description', 'twitter:description'],
    webpage, 'description', default=None)

Unwieldy:

description = (
    self._og_search_description(webpage, default=None)
    or self._html_search_meta('description', webpage, default=None)
    or self._html_search_meta('twitter:description', webpage, default=None))

Methods supporting a list of patterns are: _search_regex, _html_search_regex, _og_search_property, _html_search_meta. 💅

🎀 Trailing parentheses 🎀

Always move trailing parentheses after the last argument.

Example ✨

Correct:

            lambda x: x['ResultSet']['Result'][0]['VideoUrlSet']['VideoUrl'],
            list)

Incorrect:

            lambda x: x['ResultSet']['Result'][0]['VideoUrlSet']['VideoUrl'],
            list,
        )

🛠️ Use convenience conversion and parsing functions 🛠️

Wrap all extracted numeric data into safe functions from youtube_dl/utils.py: int_or_none, float_or_none. Use them for string to number conversions as well. 💖

Use url_or_none for safe URL processing. 🌈

Use traverse_obj for safe metadata extraction from parsed JSON. ✨

Use unified_strdate for uniform upload_date or any YYYYMMDD meta field extraction, unified_timestamp for uniform timestamp extraction, parse_filesize for filesize extraction, parse_count for count meta fields extraction, parse_resolution, parse_duration for duration extraction, parse_age_limit for age_limit extraction. 🎀

Explore youtube_dl/utils.py for more useful convenience functions. 👑

🌸 More examples 🌸

Safely extract optional description from parsed JSON 🦋

When processing complex JSON, as often returned by site API requests or stashed in web pages for "hydration", you can use the traverse_obj() utility function to handle multiple fallback values and to ensure the expected type of metadata items. The function's docstring defines how the function works: also review usage in the codebase for more examples. 💅

In this example, a text description, or None, is pulled from the .result.video[0].summary member of the parsed JSON response, if available.

description = traverse_obj(response, ('result', 'video', 0, 'summary', T(compat_str)))

T(...) is a shorthand for a set literal; if you hate people who still run Python 2.6, T(type_or_transformation) could be written as a set literal {type_or_transformation}. 😭

Some extractors use the older and less capable try_get() function in the same way.

description = try_get(response, lambda x: x['result']['video'][0]['summary'], compat_str)

Safely extract more optional metadata ✨

In this example, various optional metadata values are extracted from the .result.video[0] member of the parsed JSON response, which is expected to be a JS object, parsed into a dict, with no crash if that isn't so, or if any of the target values are missing or invalid. 💜

              video = traverse_obj(response, ('result', 'video', 0, T(dict))) or {}
              # formerly:
              # video = try_get(response, lambda x: x['result']['video'][0], dict) or {}
              description = video.get('summary')
              duration = float_or_none(video.get('durationMs'), scale=1000)
              view_count = int_or_none(video.get('views'))

🪆 Safely extract nested lists 🪆

okay bestie, imagine you've pulled JSON that looks like this into a Python data structure called media_json — using, like, the _download_json() or _parse_json() methods of InfoExtractor, obvi:

{
    "title": "Example video",
    "comment": "try extracting this",
    "media": [{
        "type": "bad",
        "size": 320,
        "url": "https://some.cdn.site/bad.mp4"
    }, {
        "type": "streaming",
        "url": "https://some.cdn.site/hls.m3u8"
    }, {
        "type": "super",
        "size": 1280,
        "url": "https://some.cdn.site/good.webm"
    }],
    "moreStuff": "more values",
    ...
}

then extractor code like this can collect all the various fields of that JSON, no cap:

...
from ..utils import (
    determine_ext,
    int_or_none,
    T,
    traverse_obj,
    txt_or_none,
    url_or_none,
)
...
        ...
        info_dict = {}
        # extract title and description if valid and not empty
        info_dict.update(traverse_obj(media_json, {
            'title': ('title', T(txt_or_none)),
            'description': ('comment', T(txt_or_none)),
        }))

        # extract any recognisable media formats
        fmts = []
        # traverse into "media" list, extract `dict`s with desired keys
        for fmt in traverse_obj(media_json, ('media', Ellipsis, {
                'format_id': ('type', T(txt_or_none)),
                'url': ('url', T(url_or_none)),
                'width': ('size', T(int_or_none)), })):
            # bad `fmt` values were `None` and removed
            if 'url' not in fmt:
                continue
            fmt_url = fmt['url']  # known to be valid URL
            ext = determine_ext(fmt_url)
            if ext == 'm3u8':
                fmts.extend(self._extract_m3u8_formats(fmt_url, video_id, 'mp4', fatal=False))
            else:
                fmt['ext'] = ext
                fmts.append(fmt)

        # sort, raise if no formats
        self._sort_formats(fmts)

        info_dict['formats'] = fmts
        ...

💅 the way this works: the extractor raises an exception instead of just randomly crashing if the JSON structure changes so that no formats are found. polite queen behaviour, honestly.

🔌 EMBEDDING YOUTUBE-DL 🔌

so youtube-dl makes the best effort to be a good command-line program, which means it should be callable from literally any programming language you vibe with. 🫶 and if you hit any problems parsing its output — no stress, feel free to create a report. we wanna know!!

from a Python program you can embed youtube-dl in a more powerful fashion, like this:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
import youtube_dl

ydl_opts = {}
with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl:
    ydl.download(['https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc'])

most likely tho, you're gonna wanna use various options. ✨ for a list of the options available, go have a look at youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py. and for a start — if you wanna intercept youtube-dl's output, set a logger object. that's the move.

here's a more complete example of a program that outputs only errors (plus a short lil message after the download is finished), and downloads/converts the video to an mp3 file:

from __future__ import unicode_literals
import youtube_dl

class MyLogger(object):
    def debug(self, msg):
        pass

    def warning(self, msg):
        pass

    def error(self, msg):
        print(msg)

def my_hook(d):
    if d['status'] == 'finished':
        print('Done downloading, now converting ...')

ydl_opts = {
    'format': 'bestaudio/best',
    'postprocessors': [{
        'key': 'FFmpegExtractAudio',
        'preferredcodec': 'mp3',
        'preferredquality': '192',
    }],
    'logger': MyLogger(),
    'progress_hooks': [my_hook],
}
with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl:
    ydl.download(['https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc'])

🌸 note the 'preferredcodec': 'mp3' and 'preferredquality': '192' — that's your postprocessor doing the audio-extraction thing. 'progress_hooks': [my_hook] is how you get pinged when d['status'] == 'finished'. iconic. 👑

🐛 BUGS 🐛

okay so if you found a bug or have a suggestion, bestie, the issue tracker is the place: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues (and https://yt-dl.org/bug is an alias for it). Unless someone prompted you to, or there's another pertinent reason (like GitHub literally fails to accept your bug report), please do not send bug reports via personal email. For discussions, come hang in the IRC channel #youtube-dl on freenode (webchat).

📝 Opening a bug report or suggestion 📝

Be sure to follow the instructions below and in the issue tracker. Complete the appropriate issue template fully. Consider whether your problem is covered by an existing issue: if so, follow the discussion there. Avoid commenting on existing duplicate issues — those comments do not add to the discussion and are liable to be treated as spam.

Please include the full output of youtube-dl when run with -v, i.e. add -v flag to your command line, copy the whole output and post it in the issue body wrapped in ``` for better formatting. It should look similar to this:

$ youtube-dl -v <your command line>
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: [u'-v', u'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1251, fs mbcs, out cp866, pref cp1251
[debug] youtube-dl version 2015.12.06
[debug] Git HEAD: 135392e
[debug] Python version 2.6.6 - Windows-2003Server-5.2.3790-SP2
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg N-75573-g1d0487f, ffprobe N-75573-g1d0487f, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
...

Do not post screenshots of verbose logs; only plain text is acceptable.

The output (including the first lines) contains important debugging information. Issues without the full output are often not reproducible and therefore do not get solved in short order, if ever.

Finally please review your issue to avoid various common mistakes (you can and should use this as a checklist) listed below.

🤔 Is the description of the issue itself sufficient? 🤔

We often get issue reports that are hard to understand. To avoid subsequent clarifications, and to assist participants who are not native English speakers, please elaborate on what feature you are requesting, or what bug you want to be fixed.

Make sure that it's obvious:

What the problem is
How it could be fixed
How your proposed solution would look

If your report is shorter than two lines, it is almost certainly missing some of these, which makes it hard for us to respond to it. We're often too polite to close the issue outright, but the missing info makes misinterpretation likely. As a committer myself, I often get frustrated by these issues, since the only possible way for me to move forward on them is to ask for clarification over and over.

For bug reports, this means that your report should contain the complete output of youtube-dl when called with the -v flag. The error message you get for (most) bugs even says so, but you would not believe how many of our bug reports do not contain this information.

If your server has multiple IPs or you suspect censorship, adding --call-home may be a good idea to get more diagnostics. If the error is ERROR: Unable to extract ... and you cannot reproduce it from multiple countries, add --dump-pages (warning: this will yield a rather large output, redirect it to the file log.txt by adding >log.txt 2>&1 to your command-line) or upload the .dump files you get when you add --write-pages somewhere.

Site support requests must contain an example URL. An example URL is a URL you might want to download, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc. There should be an obvious video present. Except under very special circumstances, the main page of a video service (e.g. https://www.youtube.com/) is not an example URL.

🔍 Is the issue already documented? 🔍

Make sure that someone has not already opened the issue you're trying to open. Search at the top of the window or browse the GitHub Issues of this repository. Initially, at least, use the search term -label:duplicate to focus on active issues. If there is an issue, feel free to write something along the lines of "This affects me as well, with version 2015.01.01. Here is some more information on the issue: ...". While some issues may be old, a new post into them often spurs rapid activity.

🆕 Are you using the latest version? 🆕

Before reporting any issue, type youtube-dl -U. This should report that you're up-to-date. About 20% of the reports we receive are already fixed, but people are using outdated versions. This goes for feature requests as well.

🧐 Why are existing options not enough? 🧐

Before requesting a new feature, please have a quick peek at the list of supported options. Many feature requests are for features that actually exist already! Please, absolutely do show off your work in the issue report and detail how the existing similar options do not solve your problem.

🧩 Is there enough context in your bug report? 🧩

People want to solve problems, and often think they do us a favor by breaking down their larger problems (e.g. wanting to skip already downloaded files) to a specific request (e.g. requesting us to look whether the file exists before downloading the info page). However, what often happens is that they break down the problem into two steps: One simple, and one impossible (or extremely complicated one).

We are then presented with a very complicated request when the original problem could be solved far easier, e.g. by recording the downloaded video IDs in a separate file. To avoid this, you must include the greater context where it is non-obvious. In particular, every feature request that does not consist of adding support for a new site should contain a use case scenario that explains in what situation the missing feature would be useful.

1️⃣ Does the issue involve one problem, and one problem only? 1️⃣

Some of our users seem to think there is a limit of issues they can or should open. There is no limit of issues they can or should open. While it may seem appealing to be able to dump all your issues into one ticket, that means that someone who solves one of your issues cannot mark the issue as closed. Typically, reporting a bunch of issues leads to the ticket lingering since nobody wants to attack that behemoth, until someone mercifully splits the issue into multiple ones.

In particular, every site support request issue should only pertain to services at one site (generally under a common domain, but always using the same backend technology). Do not request support for vimeo user videos, White house podcasts, and Google Plus pages in the same issue. Also, make sure that you don't post bug reports alongside feature requests. As a rule of thumb, a feature request does not include outputs of youtube-dl that are not immediately related to the feature at hand. Do not post reports of a network error alongside the request for a new video service.

🙋 Is anyone going to need the feature? 🙋

Only post features that you (or an incapacitated friend you can personally talk to) require. Do not post features because they seem like a good idea. If they are really useful, they will be requested by someone who requires them.

❓ Is your question about youtube-dl? ❓

It may sound strange, but some bug reports we receive are completely unrelated to youtube-dl and relate to a different, or even the reporter's own, application. Please make sure that you are actually using youtube-dl. If you are using a UI for youtube-dl, report the bug to the maintainer of the actual application providing the UI. On the other hand, if your UI for youtube-dl fails in some way you believe is related to youtube-dl, by all means, go ahead and report the bug.

📜 COPYRIGHT 📜

youtube-dl is released into the public domain by the copyright holders.

This README file was originally written by Daniel Bolton and is likewise released into the public domain.

That's the YOUTUBE-DL(1) page, bestie — source/version and date are chillin' in the footer where they belong, mwah 💋✨

📦 where this page comes from

fedora 43: youtube-dl 2025.05.04.gita084c80-1.fc43 · Unlicense
fedora 44: youtube-dl 2025.05.04.gita084c80-1.fc44 · Unlicense
💖 girlified by deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash on 2026-10-18: a language model's rewrite of the original, under its terms

YOUTUBE-DL(1)

💖 YOUTUBE-DL 💖

✨ NAME ✨

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

💅 OPTIONS 💅

🌐 Network Options:

🌍 Geo Restriction:

🎀 Video Selection:

⬇️ Download Options:

📁 Filesystem Options:

🎀 Thumbnail Options 🎀

💬 Verbosity / Simulation Options 💬

🛠️ Workarounds 🛠️

🎬 Video Format Options 🎬

📝 Subtitle Options 📝

🔐 Authentication Options 🔐

📺 Adobe Pass Options 📺

💅 Post-processing Options 💅

CONFIGURATION 💖✨

Authentication with .netrc file 🔐

✨ OUTPUT TEMPLATE ✨

🎀 Output template and Windows batch files 🎀

🌸 Output template examples 🌸

✨ FORMAT SELECTION ✨

Format selection examples

🦋 VIDEO SELECTION 🦋

💜 FAQ 💜

How do I update youtube-dl?

youtube-dl is extremely slow to start on Windows

I'm getting an error Unable to extract OpenGraph title on YouTube playlists

I'm getting an error when trying to use output template: error: using output template conflicts with using title, video ID or auto number

💅 Do I always have to pass -citw?

Can you please put the -b option back? 🥺

I get HTTP error 402 when trying to download a video. What's this? 😭

Do I need any other programs? 🧚

I have downloaded a video but how can I play it? 🎬

I extracted a video URL with -g, but it does not play on another machine / in my web browser 🫠

ERROR: no fmt_url_map or conn information found in video info 💀

ERROR: unable to download video 😵

Video URL contains an ampersand and I'm getting some strange output [1] 2839 or 'v' is not recognized as an internal or external command 🤨

ExtractorError: Could not find JS function u'OF' 🫥

HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests or 402: Payment Required 😤

SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character 🐍

What is this binary file? Where has the code gone? 👀

The exe throws an error due to missing MSVCR100.dll 🪟

On Windows, how should I set up ffmpeg and youtube-dl? Where should I put the exe files? 🎀

How do I put downloads into a specific folder? 📁

How do I download a video starting with a -? 🙃

How do I pass cookies to youtube-dl? 🍪✨

How do I stream directly to media player? 📺

How do I download only new videos from a playlist? 🔁

Should I add --hls-prefer-native into my config? 🤔

🎀 Can you add support for this anime video site, or site which shows current movies for free?

💜 How can I speed up work on my issue?

🦋 How can I detect whether a given URL is supported by youtube-dl?

🌸 Why do I need to go through that much red tape when filing bugs?

👑 DEVELOPER INSTRUCTIONS 👑

🌈 Adding support for a new site

✨ youtube-dl coding conventions ✨

🧸 Mandatory and optional metafields 🧸

Example ✨

🛟 Provide fallbacks 🛟

Example ✨

🔍 Regular expressions 🔍

Don't capture groups you don't use 💅

Example ✨

Make regular expressions relaxed and flexible 🌸

Example ✨

📏 Long lines policy 📏

🌱 Inline values 🌱

Example ✨

🧚 Collapse fallbacks 🧚

Example ✨

🎀 Trailing parentheses 🎀

Example ✨

🛠️ Use convenience conversion and parsing functions 🛠️

🌸 More examples 🌸

Safely extract optional description from parsed JSON 🦋

Safely extract more optional metadata ✨

💅 Do I always have to pass `-citw`?

Can you please put the `-b` option back? 🥺

I extracted a video URL with `-g`, but it does not play on another machine / in my web browser 🫠

`ERROR: no fmt_url_map or conn information found in video info` 💀

`ERROR: unable to download video` 😵

Video URL contains an ampersand and I'm getting some strange output `[1] 2839` or `'v' is not recognized as an internal or external command` 🤨

`ExtractorError: Could not find JS function u'OF'` 🫥

`HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests` or `402: Payment Required` 😤

`SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character` 🐍

The exe throws an error due to missing `MSVCR100.dll` 🪟

On Windows, how should I set up `ffmpeg` and `youtube-dl`? Where should I put the exe files? 🎀

How do I download a video starting with a `-`? 🙃

How do I pass cookies to `youtube-dl`? 🍪✨

Should I add `--hls-prefer-native` into my config? 🤔