ytdl is a small script for Linux as an alternative interface to yt-dlp (which itself is a fork from youtube-dl, to download YouTube videos). My goal is to make some of its functionality a bit more accessible for the daily usage. This includes predefined settings and narrowing it down to options I care most about.
Doesn’t seem that much simpler, tbh.
yt-dlp --helpvsytdl -hand you still need to read theman yt-dlpto understand some concepts.deleted by creator
Probably the yt-dlp config could easily reduce complexity and leverage yt-dlp the most. However cool project though.
TBH I just set an alias to
alias yt='yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4"'and thenyt [URL of video]is all I need to type.Hi, a little bit late to reply, but I just saw your comment. Agreed with you, if this is all you need, its better to have simple alias than using a foreign script from someone else. I had something like this too, but it was not enough for me. In example when I want to download entire playlist (which would create dedicated subfolder as well), or want to extract the audio for music only. And I also want to download or embed meta informations and other files.
Once you see whats possible, you won’t go back (at least for me). yt-dlp is very complex by its nature and my script is a hope to make a few steps easier, and to bring attention to really cool features such as sponsorblock. Also I just recently found out it can repack the output format to “mp4” in example, which I added it as an option
-f.Sorry for the lengthy reply to a comment that was not targeted to me, but I felt like telling you this. Have a good day!
Oh yeah I do other more complicated things when necessary, that’s just my day-to-day thing for when I need to grab a copy of a video quickly!
Still need someone to understand all the options, write a correct configuration. A configuration is still a single configuration for a single use case and would a different one based on what I want to do, and it still requires a script with options. There are some option dependencies, that are not possible without a script. I believe this script would help other users too, who just pick one or two options from this short list.
All I do is
For 360p,
yt-dlp -f 134+250 URLFor 720p,
yt-dlp -f 136+250 URLIf I want the maximum audio quality that YouTube never makes available, change 250 to 251.
This gives me AV1 encoded video stream with OPUS 64kbps audio (or 128kbps for code 251). Anything beyond 720p encoded by Google is usually a waste, unless there is some specific reason you need 1080 or 2K marginally better resolution increase. The VMAF cutoff for YouTube encoded videos is optimal around 720p AV1.
If I need to ensure whatever I am downloading works on some TV via a USB pendrive, instead of AV1, I will select the VP9 video stream (243 or 247 codes). Verifying quickly via
yt-dlp -F URLhelps.
