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Download YouTube Videos in Linux Command Line your journey to become a better,
Last updated October 29, 2020 By Abhishek Prakash — 139 Comments informed desktop Linux user.

Brief: Easily download YouTube videos in Linux using youtube-dl command line tool. With this Name
tool, you can also choose video format and video quality such as 1080p or 4K.
E-Mail Address

Yes, let me in!

I know you have already seen how to download YouTube videos. But those tools were mostly
GUI ways. I am going to show you how to download YouTube videos in Linux terminal using
youtube-dl.

Install youtube-dl to download YouTube videos in Linux

terminal
youtube-dl is a Python-based small command-line tool that allows downloading videos from
YouTube, Dailymotion, Photobucket, Facebook, Yahoo, Metacafe, Depositfiles and few more
similar sites. It is written in pygtk and requires Python interpreter to run this program, it’s not
platform restricted. It should run on any Unix, Windows or in Mac OS X based systems.

The youtube-dl tool supports resuming interrupted downloads. If youtube-dl is killed (for
example by Ctrl-C or due to loss of Internet connectivity) in the middle of the download, you
can simply re-run it with the same YouTube video URL. It will automatically resume the
unfinished download, as long as a partial download is present in the current directory. Which
means you don’t need download managers in Linux just for resuming downloads.

youtube-dl features
This tiny tool has so many features that it won’t be an exaggeration to call it the best YouTube
downloader for Linux.

Download videos from not only YouTube but other popular video websites like
Dailymotion, Facebook etc
Allows downloading videos in several available video formats such as MP4, WebM etc.
You can also choose the quality of the video being downloaded. If the video is available
in 4K, you can download it in 4K, 1080p, 720p etc
Automatical pause and resume of video downloads.
Allows to bypass YouTube geo-restrictions

Attention!

Downloading videos from websites could be against their policies. It’s up to you if
choose to download videos.

How to install youtube-dl on Linux

youtube-dl is a popular program and is available in the default repositories of most Linux
distributions, if not all. You can use the standard way of installing packages in your
distribution to install youtube-dl. I’ll still show some commands for the sake of it.

If you are running Ubuntu-based Linux distribution, you can install it using this command:

sudo apt install youtube-dl

The version in Debian/Ubuntu is usually old and you might face errors while downloading
videos. However, I recommend installing it directly from its source repository.

For any Linux distribution, you can quickly install youtube-dl on your system through the
command line interface with:

sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O

/usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

A er fetching the file, you need to set a executable permission on the script to execute
properly.

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Once installed, you can update it to the latest version using this command. This is helpful
when you have been using it for a few months:

youtube-dl -U

Using YouTube-dl for downloading videos:

To download a video file, simply run the following command. Where “VIDEO_URL” is the URL
of the video that you want to download.

youtube-dl <video_url>

Download YouTube videos in various formats and quality size

These days YouTube videos have di erent resolutions, you first need to check available video
formats of a given YouTube video. For that run youtube-dl with “-F” option. It will show you a
list of available formats.

youtube-dl -F <video_url>

Its output will be like:

Setting language
BlXaGWbFVKY: Downloading video webpage
BlXaGWbFVKY: Downloading video info webpage
BlXaGWbFVKY: Extracting video information
Available formats:
37 : mp4 [1080x1920]
46 : webm [1080x1920]
22 : mp4 [720x1280]
45 : webm [720x1280]
35 : flv [480x854]
44 : webm [480x854]
34 : flv [360x640]
18 : mp4 [360x640]
43 : webm [360x640]
5 : flv [240x400]
17 : mp4 [144x176]

Now among the available video formats, choose one that you like. For example, if you want to
download it in MP4 version and 1080 pixel, you should use:

youtube-dl -f 37<video_url>

Download subtitles of videos using youtube-dl

First, check if there are subtitles available for the video. To list all subs for a video, use the
command below:

youtube-dl --list-subs <video_url>

To download all subs, but not the video:

youtube-dl --all-subs --skip-download <video_url>

Download entire YouTube playlist

To download a playlist, simply run the following command. Where “playlist_url” is the URL of
the playlist that you want to download.

youtube-dl -cit <playlist_url>

Download only audio from YouTube videos

If you just want to download the audio from a YouTube video, you can use the -x option to
simply extract the audio file from the video.

youtube-dl -x <video_url>

The default file format is Ogg which you may not like. You can specify the file format of the
audio file in the following manner:

youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 <video_url>

And a lot more can be done with youtube-dl

youtube-dl is a versatile command line tool and provides a number of functionalities. No
wonder it is such a popular command line tool.

I have only shown some of the most common usages of this tool. But if you want to explore its
capabilities further, please check its manual.

I hope this article helped you to download YouTube videos on Linux. If you have questions or
suggestions, please drop a comment below.

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Filed Under: Terminal Tricks, Tutorial

Tagged With: Command Line, Download, Linux, youtube, youtube-dl

About Abhishek Prakash

Creator of It's FOSS. An ardent Linux user & open source promoter.
Huge fan of classic detective mysteries ranging from Agatha Christie
and Sherlock Holmes to Detective Columbo & Ellery Queen. Also a movie bu with a
so corner for film noir.

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