HACKER Q&A
📣 pmoriarty

How are you downloading YouTube videos?


Now that youtube-dl is gone, how are you downloading youtube videos?


  👤 CobaltFire Accepted Answer ✓
VLC.

Open the URL in VLC, then in video info the actual video file will be listed. Paste that into your browser of choice and Save As.


👤 diogenesjunior
youtube-dl isn't gone though? just the github repository is gone.

👤 pkrotich
Nice try RIAA ;)

👤 jamesponddotco
I still use it daily. I follow channels using their RSS feed instead of using the YouTube website, and when a new video is posted, I download it with youtube-dl (which is configured to send the video to /tmp) and watch.

For my use case, it still works fine. Once it stops working I can look for an alternative, I guess.


👤 thro1
I'm pressing right mouse button twice (first shows the YouTube menu, second the browser one) then save as (or view video then save as), in Firefox with media.mediasource.mp4.enabled=false - so maximal resolution which I can get and I'm happy with is 720px.

👤 ggoo
Still use youtube-dl for now but have heard good things about annie

https://github.com/iawia002/annie


👤 approxim8ion
Is youtube-dl going to stop working? I assumed the problem was limited to having the repository taken down, but are they pushing to get the service to be defunct entirely? Short of not allowing them to publish the code or executables anywhere, that would require legislation passed to prevent existing and future packages in Linux repositories to be banned, or a major change in how it interacts with YouTube from YouTube's end to render it useless.

👤 rakwoelq
If youtube-dl fails then I will resort to using the latest version of uGet since it does not rely on youtube-dl as a backend.

uGet is not flawless, there have been some instances where the audio of a downloaded video does not work. The default resolution downloaded is 360p, this can change this in the settings.

https://repology.org/project/uget/versions


👤 nagyf
Dumb question: Why would you download videos from youtube? Are you collecting videos on your hard drive? Why not just save a bookmark? I don't think youtube will be scrapped anytime soon.

I just want to understand what are the use cases for this.


👤 unicornporn
youtube-dl is _not gone_. New version just got released.

👤 green-bottle
I noticed today that youtube-dl was no longer working. I am on the latest version so there is no update that will fix things right now.

It wasn't hard to whip up a cli wrapper for NewPipeExtractor which I am already using on my phone for Youtube via Newpipe.

It is pretty limited currently, but sufficient for my purposes.


👤 benbristow
JDownloader - https://jdownloader.org/

It's a bit sketchy but the 'LinkGrabber' feature is great for downloading anything from anywhere.


👤 deathtrader666
Internet Download Manager on Windows is an amazing grabber, not just for YouTube, but all other videos and files and documents.

👤 dusted

👤 yesenadam
you-get works great. Appears very similar to youtube-dl, better CLI display, seems to take slightly longer to start downloading. I've only tried it on youtube though.

https://you-get.org/


👤 phenkdo
Related: is there a surviving fork that only extracts non-copyrighted content (e.g metadata) ?

👤 jdc
Still using youtube-dl but will probably be using youtube-dlc in the not too distant future.

👤 dreamcompiler
One more time RIAA:

The Internet Interprets Censorship As Damage And Routes Around It.


👤 turpialito
Easy YouTube Downloader Express. Works up to 720p.

👤 HariPavan
I am using y2mate[dot]guru to download

👤 anthk
streamlink

👤 runawaybottle
Almost makes you wonder if Google/Spotify/Apple co-signed the takedown. Who else would give a shit?