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. It is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter (2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+), and it is not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.
Update: Check out this bash script – it does same thing without using python.
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I think you should update the article, the project has apparently moved to github:
http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
There’s a new script for linux to search and watch youtube’s video on linux shell, called YouShell.
http://code.google.com/p/youshell/
usage: utube NAME youtubeurl
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)
Nice youtube script, thanks so much!
Mark
Wearetherock, MANY THANKS! Simplicity is what I like, great script.
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.
Hmm, anyone got a perl one liner for this job? 😉
#!/bin/bash
### mr-paul
### paul@sci.ubu.ac.th
if [ “$1” = “” ]; then
echo -e “nUsage: getyoutube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHvAXLBMWGIn”
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
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
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
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?
I recommend http://www.snatchvid.com it’s very easy and fast to use!
I use http://www.savetube.com to save any youtube videos. They also got a latest saved section.
James,
You can use
<pre>code</pre>
or
<code>code</code> tags 🙂
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
#!/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 “
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 ${tmp} | grep ‘h1 id=”video_title”‘ | cut -d “>” -f 2 | cut -d “
The ZSH code has a problem:
ffmpeg version 0.4.9-pre1, build 4718, Copyright (c) 2000-2004 Fabrice Bellard
built on Apr 4 2005 06:01:28, gcc: 3.4.2 [FreeBSD] 20040728
Input #0, flv, from ‘j0u_F8-oYQE.flv’:
Duration: N/A, bitrate: N/A
Stream #0.0: Audio: mp3, 22050 Hz, mono
Stream #0.1: Video: flv, 320×240, 15.00 fps
Output #0, mpeg, to ‘j0u_F8-oYQE.mpg’:
Stream #0.0: Video: mpeg1video, 320×240, 15.00 fps, q=2-31, 500 kb/s
Stream #0.1: Audio: mp2, 22050 Hz, mono, 56 kb/s
Stream mapping:
Stream #0.1 -> #0.0
Stream #0.0 -> #0.1
[mpeg1video @ 0x282f4010]MPEG1/2 doesnt support 15/1 fps
Error while opening codec for stream #0.0 – maybe incorrect parameters such as bit_rate, rate, width or height
great 😀
thats real hacking lol
Nice to see you are using Zsh 🙂
Appreciate your script/post.
Great information, thanks very much!
You might try this for Zsh (maybe modern Bournes?):
ytdl () {
video_id=${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.
lol @ rm gmon.out
Hee
Nice and dirty bash work
Appreciate your post.
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 🙂