App Highlight: youtube-dl


Do you ever want to download a video from a website? I often do. The easiest way I've found is with youtube-dl.

This tool will download a video for you, and it supports a lot more than just Youtube. The full list of supported sites is here, it's quite extensive. I have found it quite easy to use. The basic operation is simply:

$ youtube-dl <URL>

It will crawl the page metadata, find the video file, and pull it down for you. You can tell it to download the best quality:

$ youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio <URL>

If you're concerned about file size, you can ask for the best video with a size constraint. This will download the best quality (audio and video) with a filesize under 50 MB:

$ youtube-dl -f 'best[filesize<50M]'

There are a ton more options, check out the documentation for more info.

I've only used youtube-dl on Linux, but it supports Windows and MacOS as well.

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