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/
#!/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}â€.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.â€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" fiGood 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