amuck-landowner

Tool for archiving / downloading a YouTube playlist?

MannDude

Just a dude
vpsBoard Founder
Moderator
I have a YouTube playlist of just about 900 'videos' (songs) that I'd like to archive locally. It's music that I can stand, and I'd like a local copy to shuffle through.

Are there any decent tools available that will do this? I can rip them one by one, but that would take way too much time. With just the playlist URL, is there a tool available that can archive the entire list?

Thanks!
 

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

Command line linux. Make sure to keep it updated and download the latest, because it's sensitive to Google HTML changes, etc. I always download from github and keep in /usr/local/bin rather than using the hopelessly behind distro version.

Works flawlessly for me. something like:

# discover which formats are available
youtube-dl -F '$url'
# download one in a chosen format and pick its file name
youtube-dl -f 18 -o 'tentacle hentai.mp4' '$url'
# download an entire playlist
youtube-dl -f 18 '$url'

Then I use Handbrake to convert for video...if I'm just stripping the audio out, I use Format Factory.
 

ServerGuy

New Member
http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/

Command line linux. Make sure to keep it updated and download the latest, because it's sensitive to Google HTML changes, etc. I always download from github and keep in /usr/local/bin rather than using the hopelessly behind distro version.

Works flawlessly for me. something like:

# discover which formats are available
youtube-dl -F '$url'
# download one in a chosen format and pick its file name
youtube-dl -f 18 -o 'tentacle hentai.mp4' '$url'
# download an entire playlist
youtube-dl -f 18 '$url'

Then I use Handbrake to convert for video...if I'm just stripping the audio out, I use Format Factory.

you can use youtube-dl -F '$url' and it will list all the format and I think 139 is for .m4a so you don't have to convert it to audio later, it will download audio only
 

WasNotWSS

Member
Don't forget to have ffmpeg installed as well. You may get m4a, .opus, etc for audio formats- it seems to differentiate depending on the uploader's choice of codec at the time.

youtube-dl -x is what I used for audio download as filler for last weeks' funeral, then just scripted a simple ffmpeg {options} -i $file -o $file.mp3 - VLC came to the rescue yet again as I needed to adapt an HDMI video output but the audio device was only available via RCA (or 3.5mm stereo plug). Took less than a few seconds to get running.

--

There is a YT-DL Windows standalone port that works just ducky with a statically-built ffmpeg. Ended up using that when they changed the lineup on me. I had to lookup how to do for loops in cmd, but everything actually worked!
 

raindog308

vpsBoard Premium Member
Moderator
I use youtube-dl frequently to download youtube stuff for plane rides. Just remember that if get an error, most times it's because your youtube-dl is older. Every time Google changes YT html, youtube-dl can potentially break.

There is a youtube-dl -u feature that will auto-update if you run it sudo/root.

I usually don't bother installing from a repo because it's out of date at the start and it's easy to invoke the wrong one. Just doing a git clone works fine, since it's just a python script.
 
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