youtube-dl

simple but efficient commandline tool. I used it to download complete playlists of videos from Youtube with there original subtitles.

Good command-line tool that does what it says: download videos (and optionally, convert them to other formats, including grabbing the audio part only) from YouTube and many, many other websites. One downside: it can't download music clips from YouTube--it gives an error message. Strange, since it CAN grab the audio portion only of a video on YouTube; but apparently it can't handle an audio-only file on YouTube. Apart from that, works okay though.

[Edited by LB7979, September 02]

The best online media downloader. It can download from every media site, it's amazing.

Does what it needs to do, has format options, no bullshit. Also downloads from other video hosts. You know what I mean.
Non-technical users may find the CLI weird, welcome to computers!
Remember to update frequently.

Simple, after learning the main commands

youtube-dl can appear daunting at first, because it is a Terminal-only script at the moment: therefore, some knowledge of Terminal is necessary.

However, after learning the key commands for downloading videos at the highest quality, youtube-dl became surprisingly simple. On the first night, I downloaded about 30 videos at the best quality possible.

With the closure of KeepVid, many users had to find an alternative, and it can be really hard to find out which one automatically combines the video and audio without substantial quality loss, and which one forces the user to fill a “survey”, only to leave empty-handed or worse.

As such, youtube-dl is a promising alternative to the increasingly fragmented landscape of online video downloading services. My suggestion for improvement is that youtube-dl could introduce a graphical user interface (GUI) to attract users who do not know Terminal well: a GUI for youtube-dl will be game over for the online video downloading services.*

[Edited by bird, February 25]

*I was made aware of Youtube-DLG after the original version of the review. My bad there, sorry.

The real deal, thanks for existing.

It works brilliantly. Small download, open a terminal, run youtube-dl https://xyz.site.com/linkABC
Years later now, still the best tool that works near always!

[Edited by fundutzi, January 07]

Perhaps the most simple and effective YouTube download utility around. When paired with the YouTube-DLG it is a breeze to use.

One simple command line program that does it all.

Whether it's downloading a Youtube video, extracting audio from Youtube videos or download a whole playlist, this does it all and it's intelligent enough to recognize video URLs.

• +for being a CLI application
• +for being released in public domain

I've already written a short review on the GUI of this program, YouTube-DLG, so check that out. I just wanted to mention that you should make sure to keep this program updated (grabbing the newest package directly from the official website, NOT a repository that might be outdated); otherwise, a random change in YouTube's functions will cause it to fail. I cannot tell you how long I've put up with an error message saying "YouTube said: Invalid parameters", which was fixed by a simple update.

A great and safe alternative to video downloading websites with literally thousands of supported websites it can download from. It allows a great control over parameters of downloaded media (media formats, resolutions, etc.), it can also download subtitles and with a GUI frontend youtube-dlg it's very easy to use.

Wow !
It couldn't be more easy to use.
It does exactly what it should do without any useless fancy stuff.
And with all the switches it gives multi choices of video or audio format.
Goodbye for ever 4K downloader or J downloader with their heavy GUI.

Thank you !

Thank you. Other reviews say it all.

Reviews and comments about this software are agenda related.
This is open source software and will take you some time to set it up.