Download and watch YouTube videos from Linux shell prompt

by nixCraft on August 14, 2006 · 24 comments· LAST UPDATED August 15, 2006

Joe Barr shows us how to enhance your YouTube viewing pleasure!

FTA, "Publishing your own video on YouTube, or watching other people's videos, is all the rage these days. Why are we talking about YouTube, in a column about the CLI? Because this week we're writing about youtube-dl, a clever little CLI tool that's easy to install and and use to fetch YouTube videos.

Youtube-dl is a Python script, licensed under the "non-copyleft" free software MIT/X11 license. It is not platform-specific; it can run under Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows platforms so long as a recent -- 2.4 or later -- version of Python is installed."

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{ 24 comments… read them below or add one }

1 bash August 14, 2006 at 3:15 pm

http://bashscripts.org/viewtopic.php?t=210

#!/bin/bash bu="http://youtube.com/get_video.php?";mkdir -p ~/YouTube;cd ~/YouTube;read -p "YouTube url? " ur;read -p "Name? " nv wget ${ur} -O /tmp/y1;uf=${bu}`grep player2.swf /tmp/y1 | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\" -f1`;wget "${uf}" -O /tmp/y.flv ffmpeg -i /tmp/y.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 ${nv}.mpg;rm /tmp/y.flv; rm /tmp/y1;rm gmon.out; exit
BASH RULES :)

2 nixcraft August 14, 2006 at 6:27 pm

Hee

Nice and dirty bash work

Appreciate your post.

3 Ivan August 18, 2006 at 7:46 am

lol @ rm gmon.out

4 Ray August 18, 2006 at 8:02 am

Great information, thanks very much!

You might try this for Zsh (maybe modern Bournes?):
ytdl () { video_id=${1#http://*youtube.com/watch?v=} video_id=${video_id#http://*youtube.com/v/} video_id=${video_id%&*} player_line=`ftp -o - "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$video_id"|grep /player2.swf` base_getter_url=http://youtube.com/get_video.php? url=${player_line/*player2.swf\?/$base_getter_url} url=${url%%\"*} ftp -o $video_id.flv "$url" ffmpeg -i $video_id.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320x240 $video_id.mpg echo echo mplayer $video_id.mpg }

If you have an ftp with HTTP support.

5 nixcraft August 19, 2006 at 6:17 pm

Nice to see you are using Zsh :)

Appreciate your script/post.

6 luke September 19, 2006 at 7:39 am

great :D
thats real hacking lol

7 TjL October 21, 2006 at 3:12 am

The ZSH code has a problem:

ffmpeg version 0.4.9-pre1, build 4718, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
built on Apr 4 2005 06:01:28, gcc: 3.4.2 [FreeBSD] 20040728
Input #0, flv, from ‘j0u_F8-oYQE.flv’:
Duration: N/A, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono
Stream #0.1: Video: flv, 320×240, 15.00 fps
Output #0, mpeg, to ‘j0u_F8-oYQE.mpg’:
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg1video, 320×240, 15.00 fps, q=2-31, 500 kb/s
Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 22050 Hz, mono, 56 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Stream #0.0 -> #0.1
[mpeg1video @ 0x282f4010]MPEG1/2 doesnt support 15/1 fps
Error while opening codec for stream #0.0 – maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height

8 James February 14, 2007 at 4:32 am

Here’s the bash script, made more solid. I fixed the ffmpeg call (it doesn’t like making 15fps mpeg files), and kept the flv at the end.

If you want to use the flv from your own apache server you’ll need to add

video/x-flv flv

to /etc/mime.types and restart apache, then go and get flash_flv player from http://www.jeroenwijering.com/upload/flash_flv_player.zip

unpack it, put flvplayer.swf and flvplayer.html on your site with the .flv, and modify flvplayer.html appropriately

#!/bin/bash
bu=”http://youtube.com/get_video.php?”
tmp=`mktemp`
touch ${tmp}.flv
read -p “YouTube url? ” ur
wget ${ur} -O ${tmp}
uf=${bu}`grep player2.swf ${tmp} | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\” -f1`
nv=`cat ${tmp} | grep ‘h1 id=”video_title”‘ | cut -d “>” -f 2 | cut -d “

9 James February 14, 2007 at 4:35 am

10 James February 14, 2007 at 4:36 am

nv=`cat ${tmp} | grep ‘h1 id=”video_title”‘ | cut -d “>” -f 2 | cut -d “lt” -f 1`

*** i can’t post a less than symbol, so change the lt in that command to a less than symbol

echo “Title ${nv}”
wget “${uf}” -O ${tmp}.flv
ffmpeg -i ${tmp}.flv -r 30 -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 1500k -s 320×240 “${nv}.mpg”
mv ${tmp}.flv “${nv}.flv”
rm ${tmp}
exit

11 nixcraft February 15, 2007 at 4:39 am

James,

You can use
<pre>code</pre>

or
<code>code</code> tags :)

12 SaveTube February 19, 2007 at 6:34 am

I use http://www.savetube.com to save any youtube videos. They also got a latest saved section.

13 Jen February 28, 2007 at 10:14 pm

I recommend http://www.snatchvid.com it’s very easy and fast to use!

14 James Attard June 19, 2007 at 2:22 pm

does anybody know how he arrived to the get_video.php ? i mean how did he know that that php file existed on youtube servers?

15 Coolclu3 August 28, 2007 at 4:55 pm

Uhm…youtube has changed their code. now this script doesn’t work any more, from something like 20th August – 20007. Anyone can help fix the code? savetube.com has done it

16 Roger October 12, 2007 at 11:24 am

A good script is Mortube
Demo: http://www.morllaines.com/busca_youtube/?tag=brasil (Portuguese)
Download: http://www.morllaines.com/downloads/arquivo.php?file=54 (English)

The script require youtube apy key on config.php
And Curl installed on server

17 wearetherock April 2, 2008 at 6:05 am

#!/bin/bash

### mr-paul
### paul@sci.ubu.ac.th

if [ "$1" = "" ]; then
echo -e “\nUsage: getyoutube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHvAXLBMWGI\n”
else
url=$1
name=${url:(-11)} ### get the last 11 chars
#echo $name

fullscreenURL=$( wget -q -nv $url -O – | grep \&video_id= )
echo $fullscreenURL
title=${fullscreenURL##*=} ### delete to last occurance of ‘=’
title=${title/\’;/} ### replace ‘; with nothing ${title:(-2)} or #{title#(-2)} do not work’ :(
echo $title

videoID=${fullscreenURL:54} ### cut first 53 chars
videoID=${videoID/\’;/} ##
echo $videoID

wget -q -nv “http://www.youtube.com/get_video?$videoID” -O “$title.flv”
fi

18 clarjon1 May 20, 2008 at 2:20 pm

Hmm, anyone got a perl one liner for this job? ;)

19 Rob May 29, 2008 at 9:47 pm

There’s now a software tool to allow linux users to download youtube videos to a preferred directory, in a variety of formats (mpeg, wmv, mp4, flv, avi), specifying the resolution… all in a GTK theme’d graphical tool.

Check it here:
http://yourtubedownloader.awardspace.com/

Feedback most appreciated, via the forums or by email.

20 macias July 13, 2008 at 7:19 pm

Wearetherock, MANY THANKS! Simplicity is what I like, great script.

21 Webdesign November 26, 2008 at 3:19 pm

Nice youtube script, thanks so much!

Mark

22 Jim Bowe December 17, 2008 at 1:36 pm

Good script to do this in bash here:
http://blog.johnlawrence.net/2008/12/youtube-download-shell-script/

Works with the latest YouTube versions. (As of December 2008)

23 xijhing August 18, 2009 at 5:16 am

usage: utube NAME youtubeurl

#!/bin/bash
if [ $# -ne 2 ]
then
echo “Usage : $0 ”
echo “e.g : $0 steve_jobs http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA”
else
todnload=$(youtube-dl -g -b $2 | xargs wget –spider 2>&1 | grep Location: | awk '{print $2}')
#echo -e “Got the file…\n$todnload”
axel $todnload -q -o ~/$1.flv
echo “Download Completed…”
ffmpeg -i $1.flv -r 50 -ar 48000 -ab 196000 -b 300k -croptop 0 -cropbottom 0 -cropleft 0 -cropright 0 $1.mp4
echo "Cleaning up..."
rm ~/$1.flv
rm ~/videoplayback?ip*
echo "Done! Enjoy watching $1"
fi

24 phar0z September 14, 2009 at 8:24 pm

#!/bin/bash
# checking whether you have youtube-dl
if [ ! -x `which youtube-dl`  ];then
echo “Error! youtube-dl isn’t installed.”
exit 0
fi
#checking whether you have vbrfix
if [ ! -x `which vbrfix`  ];then
echo “Error! vbrfix isn’t installed.”
exit 0
fi
#download video(s)
for URL in $*; do
youtube-dl -t “$1&fmt=18″
done
#process
for VIDEO in `ls *.flv`; do
OUTPUT=${VIDEO:0:${#VIDEO}-4}”.mp3″
ffmpeg -i $VIDEO -acodec copy $OUTPUT
#move video
mv $OUTPUT /home/$USER/music
vbrfix /home/$USER/music/$OUTPUT /home/$USER/music/$OUTPUT
rm -rf vbrfix.log vbrfix.tmp
#clean-up
rm -rf $VIDEO
done
echo “Done.”