Download and Watch YouTube videos from Linux Shell Prompt

Author: Last updated: August 14, 2006 26 comments

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.

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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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26 comments… add one
  • bash Aug 14, 2006 @ 15:15

    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 🙂

    Reply Link
  • 🐧 nixCraft Aug 14, 2006 @ 18:27

    Hee

    Nice and dirty bash work

    Appreciate your post.

    Reply Link
  • Ivan Aug 18, 2006 @ 7:46

    lol @ rm gmon.out

    Reply Link
  • Ray Aug 18, 2006 @ 8:02

    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.

    Reply Link
  • 🐧 nixCraft Aug 19, 2006 @ 18:17

    Nice to see you are using Zsh 🙂

    Appreciate your script/post.

    Reply Link
  • luke Sep 19, 2006 @ 7:39

    great 😀
    thats real hacking lol

    Reply Link
  • TjL Oct 21, 2006 @ 3:12

    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

    Reply Link
  • James Feb 14, 2007 @ 4:32

    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 “

    Reply Link
  • James Feb 14, 2007 @ 4:35

    #!/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 “

    Reply Link
  • James Feb 14, 2007 @ 4:36

    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

    Reply Link
  • 🐧 nixCraft Feb 15, 2007 @ 4:39

    James,

    You can use
    <pre>code</pre>

    or
    <code>code</code> tags 🙂

    Reply Link
  • SaveTube Feb 19, 2007 @ 6:34

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

    Reply Link
  • Jen Feb 28, 2007 @ 22:14

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

    Reply Link
  • James Attard Jun 19, 2007 @ 14:22

    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?

    Reply Link
  • Coolclu3 Aug 28, 2007 @ 16:55

    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

    Reply Link
  • Roger Oct 12, 2007 @ 11:24

    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

    Reply Link
  • wearetherock Apr 2, 2008 @ 6:05

    #!/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

    Reply Link
  • clarjon1 May 20, 2008 @ 14:20

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

    Reply Link
  • Rob May 29, 2008 @ 21:47

    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.

    Reply Link
  • macias Jul 13, 2008 @ 19:19

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

    Reply Link
  • Webdesign Nov 26, 2008 @ 15:19

    Nice youtube script, thanks so much!

    Mark

    Reply Link
  • Jim Bowe Dec 17, 2008 @ 13:36

    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)

    Reply Link
  • xijhing Aug 18, 2009 @ 5:16

    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
    Reply Link
  • phar0z Sep 14, 2009 @ 20:24
    #!/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.”
    Reply Link
  • Rafael Soares Apr 8, 2011 @ 17:53

    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/

    Reply Link
  • Davide Mirtillo May 6, 2011 @ 7:39

    I think you should update the article, the project has apparently moved to github:

    http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

    Reply Link

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