I have always wanted to find ways to easily extract non-copyrighted content off youtube (e.g. my own videos, royalty free music and so on). When I first attempted this, I installed some random youtube downloader software, but did not realise that it was filled with advertisements and installed a search bar add-on to my browser. The software was mediocre, did what it was supposed to do, but the overall user experience was poor and prompted me to search for an alternative.

I eventually came across youtube-dl on GitHub which is an amazing package which turned out to be the best youtube downloader I have ever used.

How to setup youtube-dl

  1. Visit youtube-dl github page and see the installation section

  2. If you are using a UNIX based machine and have curl, then proceed with the following block of code. 
    sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

    Mac users with Homebrew by:

    brew install youtube-dl
  3. To enable the ability to download youtube videos as mp3 files, we need to install ffmpeg first. For mac users with brew, this can be done simply by: 
    brew install ffmpeg
  4. Now you are ready to go!

How to use youtube-dl

  1. To download a video without any additional option, the linked content will be saved at a 720p video. 
    youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/embed/dQw4w9WgXcQ
  2. To download only the audio as mp3. 
    youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=dQw4w9WgXcQ