Provided by: youtube-dl_2021.12.17-1_all 
NAME
youtube-dl - download videos from youtube.com or other video platforms
SYNOPSIS
youtube-dl [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]
DESCRIPTION
youtube-dl is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more
sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, and it is not
platform specific. It should work on your Unix box, on Windows or on macOS. It is
released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it
however you like.
OPTIONS
-h, --help
Print this help text and exit
--version
Print program version and exit
-i, --ignore-errors
Continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist
--abort-on-error
Abort downloading of further videos (in the playlist or the command line) if an
error occurs
--dump-user-agent
Display the current browser identification
--list-extractors
List all supported extractors
--extractor-descriptions
Output descriptions of all supported extractors
--force-generic-extractor
Force extraction to use the generic extractor
--default-search PREFIX
Use this prefix for unqualified URLs. For example "gvsearch2:" downloads two
videos from google videos for youtube- dl "large apple". Use the value "auto" to
let youtube-dl guess ("auto_warning" to emit a warning when guessing). "error"
just throws an error. The default value "fixup_error" repairs broken URLs, but
emits an error if this is not possible instead of searching.
--ignore-config
Do not read configuration files. When given in the global configuration file
/etc/youtube-dl.conf: Do not read the user configuration in ~/.config/youtube-
dl/config (%APPDATA%/youtube-dl/config.txt on Windows)
--config-location PATH
Location of the configuration file; either the path to the config or its containing
directory.
--flat-playlist
Do not extract the videos of a playlist, only list them.
--mark-watched
Mark videos watched (YouTube only)
--no-mark-watched
Do not mark videos watched (YouTube only)
--no-color
Do not emit color codes in output
Network Options:
--proxy URL
Use the specified HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS proxy. To enable SOCKS proxy, specify a proper
scheme. For example socks5://127.0.0.1:1080/. Pass in an empty string (--proxy
"") for direct connection
--socket-timeout SECONDS
Time to wait before giving up, in seconds
--source-address IP
Client-side IP address to bind to
-4, --force-ipv4
Make all connections via IPv4
-6, --force-ipv6
Make all connections via IPv6
Geo Restriction:
--geo-verification-proxy URL
Use this proxy to verify the IP address for some geo-restricted sites. The default
proxy specified by --proxy (or none, if the option is not present) is used for the
actual downloading.
--geo-bypass
Bypass geographic restriction via faking X-Forwarded-For HTTP header
--no-geo-bypass
Do not bypass geographic restriction via faking X-Forwarded-For HTTP header
--geo-bypass-country CODE
Force bypass geographic restriction with explicitly provided two-letter ISO 3166-2
country code
--geo-bypass-ip-block IP_BLOCK
Force bypass geographic restriction with explicitly provided IP block in CIDR
notation
Video Selection:
--playlist-start NUMBER
Playlist video to start at (default is 1)
--playlist-end NUMBER
Playlist video to end at (default is last)
--playlist-items ITEM_SPEC
Playlist video items to download. Specify indices of the videos in the playlist
separated by commas like: "-- playlist-items 1,2,5,8" if you want to download
videos indexed 1, 2, 5, 8 in the playlist. You can specify range: " --playlist-
items 1-3,7,10-13", it will download the videos at index 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12 and
13.
--match-title REGEX
Download only matching titles (regex or caseless sub-string)
--reject-title REGEX
Skip download for matching titles (regex or caseless sub-string)
--max-downloads NUMBER
Abort after downloading NUMBER files
--min-filesize SIZE
Do not download any videos smaller than SIZE (e.g. 50k or 44.6m)
--max-filesize SIZE
Do not download any videos larger than SIZE (e.g. 50k or 44.6m)
--date DATE
Download only videos uploaded in this date
--datebefore DATE
Download only videos uploaded on or before this date (i.e. inclusive)
--dateafter DATE
Download only videos uploaded on or after this date (i.e. inclusive)
--min-views COUNT
Do not download any videos with less than COUNT views
--max-views COUNT
Do not download any videos with more than COUNT views
--match-filter FILTER
Generic video filter. Specify any key (see the "OUTPUT TEMPLATE" for a list of
available keys) to match if the key is present, !key to check if the key is not
present, key > NUMBER (like "comment_count > 12", also works with >=, <, <=, !=, =)
to compare against a number, key = 'LITERAL' (like "uploader = 'Mike Smith'", also
works with !=) to match against a string literal and & to require multiple matches.
Values which are not known are excluded unless you put a question mark (?) after
the operator. For example, to only match videos that have been liked more than 100
times and disliked less than 50 times (or the dislike functionality is not
available at the given service), but who also have a description, use --match-
filter "like_count > 100 & dislike_count <? 50 & description" .
--no-playlist
Download only the video, if the URL refers to a video and a playlist.
--yes-playlist
Download the playlist, if the URL refers to a video and a playlist.
--age-limit YEARS
Download only videos suitable for the given age
--download-archive FILE
Download only videos not listed in the archive file. Record the IDs of all
downloaded videos in it.
--include-ads
Download advertisements as well (experimental)
Download Options:
-r, --limit-rate RATE
Maximum download rate in bytes per second (e.g. 50K or 4.2M)
-R, --retries RETRIES
Number of retries (default is 10), or "infinite".
--fragment-retries RETRIES
Number of retries for a fragment (default is 10), or "infinite" (DASH, hlsnative
and ISM)
--skip-unavailable-fragments
Skip unavailable fragments (DASH, hlsnative and ISM)
--abort-on-unavailable-fragment
Abort downloading when some fragment is not available
--keep-fragments
Keep downloaded fragments on disk after downloading is finished; fragments are
erased by default
--buffer-size SIZE
Size of download buffer (e.g. 1024 or 16K) (default is 1024)
--no-resize-buffer
Do not automatically adjust the buffer size. By default, the buffer size is
automatically resized from an initial value of SIZE.
--http-chunk-size SIZE
Size of a chunk for chunk-based HTTP downloading (e.g. 10485760 or 10M) (default
is disabled). May be useful for bypassing bandwidth throttling imposed by a
webserver (experimental)
--playlist-reverse
Download playlist videos in reverse order
--playlist-random
Download playlist videos in random order
--xattr-set-filesize
Set file xattribute ytdl.filesize with expected file size
--hls-prefer-native
Use the native HLS downloader instead of ffmpeg
--hls-prefer-ffmpeg
Use ffmpeg instead of the native HLS downloader
--hls-use-mpegts
Use the mpegts container for HLS videos, allowing to play the video while
downloading (some players may not be able to play it)
--external-downloader COMMAND
Use the specified external downloader. Currently supports aria2c,avconv,axel,c
url,ffmpeg,httpie,wget
--external-downloader-args ARGS
Give these arguments to the external downloader
Filesystem Options:
-a, --batch-file FILE
File containing URLs to download ('-' for stdin), one URL per line. Lines starting
with '#', ';' or ']' are considered as comments and ignored.
--id Use only video ID in file name
-o, --output TEMPLATE
Output filename template, see the "OUTPUT TEMPLATE" for all the info
--output-na-placeholder PLACEHOLDER
Placeholder value for unavailable meta fields in output filename template (default
is "NA")
--autonumber-start NUMBER
Specify the start value for %(autonumber)s (default is 1)
--restrict-filenames
Restrict filenames to only ASCII characters, and avoid "&" and spaces in filenames
-w, --no-overwrites
Do not overwrite files
-c, --continue
Force resume of partially downloaded files. By default, youtube-dl will resume
downloads if possible.
--no-continue
Do not resume partially downloaded files (restart from beginning)
--no-part
Do not use .part files - write directly into output file
--no-mtime
Do not use the Last-modified header to set the file modification time
--write-description
Write video description to a .description file
--write-info-json
Write video metadata to a .info.json file
--write-annotations
Write video annotations to a .annotations.xml file
--load-info-json FILE
JSON file containing the video information (created with the "--write- info-json"
option)
--cookies FILE
File to read cookies from and dump cookie jar in
--cache-dir DIR
Location in the filesystem where youtube-dl can store some downloaded information
permanently. By default $XDG_CACHE_HOME/youtube-dl or ~/.cache/youtube-dl . At
the moment, only YouTube player files (for videos with obfuscated signatures) are
cached, but that may change.
--no-cache-dir
Disable filesystem caching
--rm-cache-dir
Delete all filesystem cache files
Thumbnail Options:
--write-thumbnail
Write thumbnail image to disk
--write-all-thumbnails
Write all thumbnail image formats to disk
--list-thumbnails
Simulate and list all available thumbnail formats
Verbosity / Simulation Options:
-q, --quiet
Activate quiet mode
--no-warnings
Ignore warnings
-s, --simulate
Do not download the video and do not write anything to disk
--skip-download
Do not download the video
-g, --get-url
Simulate, quiet but print URL
-e, --get-title
Simulate, quiet but print title
--get-id
Simulate, quiet but print id
--get-thumbnail
Simulate, quiet but print thumbnail URL
--get-description
Simulate, quiet but print video description
--get-duration
Simulate, quiet but print video length
--get-filename
Simulate, quiet but print output filename
--get-format
Simulate, quiet but print output format
-j, --dump-json
Simulate, quiet but print JSON information. See the "OUTPUT TEMPLATE" for a
description of available keys.
-J, --dump-single-json
Simulate, quiet but print JSON information for each command-line argument. If the
URL refers to a playlist, dump the whole playlist information in a single line.
--print-json
Be quiet and print the video information as JSON (video is still being downloaded).
--newline
Output progress bar as new lines
--no-progress
Do not print progress bar
--console-title
Display progress in console titlebar
-v, --verbose
Print various debugging information
--dump-pages
Print downloaded pages encoded using base64 to debug problems (very verbose)
--write-pages
Write downloaded intermediary pages to files in the current directory to debug
problems
--print-traffic
Display sent and read HTTP traffic
-C, --call-home
Contact the youtube-dl server for debugging
--no-call-home
Do NOT contact the youtube-dl server for debugging
Workarounds:
--encoding ENCODING
Force the specified encoding (experimental)
--no-check-certificate
Suppress HTTPS certificate validation
--prefer-insecure
Use an unencrypted connection to retrieve information about the video. (Currently
supported only for YouTube)
--user-agent UA
Specify a custom user agent
--referer URL
Specify a custom referer, use if the video access is restricted to one domain
--add-header FIELD:VALUE
Specify a custom HTTP header and its value, separated by a colon ':'. You can use
this option multiple times
--bidi-workaround
Work around terminals that lack bidirectional text support. Requires bidiv or
fribidi executable in PATH
--sleep-interval SECONDS
Number of seconds to sleep before each download when used alone or a lower bound of
a range for randomized sleep before each download (minimum possible number of
seconds to sleep) when used along with --max-sleep-interval.
--max-sleep-interval SECONDS
Upper bound of a range for randomized sleep before each download (maximum possible
number of seconds to sleep). Must only be used along with --min- sleep-interval.
Video Format Options:
-f, --format FORMAT
Video format code, see the "FORMAT SELECTION" for all the info
--all-formats
Download all available video formats
--prefer-free-formats
Prefer free video formats unless a specific one is requested
-F, --list-formats
List all available formats of requested videos
--youtube-skip-dash-manifest
Do not download the DASH manifests and related data on YouTube videos
--merge-output-format FORMAT
If a merge is required (e.g. bestvideo+bestaudio), output to given container
format. One of mkv, mp4, ogg, webm, flv. Ignored if no merge is required
Subtitle Options:
--write-sub
Write subtitle file
--write-auto-sub
Write automatically generated subtitle file (YouTube only)
--all-subs
Download all the available subtitles of the video
--list-subs
List all available subtitles for the video
--sub-format FORMAT
Subtitle format, accepts formats preference, for example: "srt" or "ass/srt/best"
--sub-lang LANGS
Languages of the subtitles to download (optional) separated by commas, use --list-
subs for available language tags
Authentication Options:
-u, --username USERNAME
Login with this account ID
-p, --password PASSWORD
Account password. If this option is left out, youtube-dl will ask interactively.
-2, --twofactor TWOFACTOR
Two-factor authentication code
-n, --netrc
Use .netrc authentication data
--video-password PASSWORD
Video password (vimeo, youku)
Adobe Pass Options:
--ap-mso MSO
Adobe Pass multiple-system operator (TV provider) identifier, use --ap-list-mso for
a list of available MSOs
--ap-username USERNAME
Multiple-system operator account login
--ap-password PASSWORD
Multiple-system operator account password. If this option is left out, youtube-dl
will ask interactively.
--ap-list-mso
List all supported multiple-system operators
Post-processing Options:
-x, --extract-audio
Convert video files to audio-only files (requires ffmpeg/avconv and
ffprobe/avprobe)
--audio-format FORMAT
Specify audio format: "best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", "vorbis", or
"wav"; "best" by default; No effect without -x
--audio-quality QUALITY
Specify ffmpeg/avconv audio quality, insert a value between 0 (better) and 9
(worse) for VBR or a specific bitrate like 128K (default 5)
--recode-video FORMAT
Encode the video to another format if necessary (currently supported:
mp4|flv|ogg|webm|mkv|avi)
--postprocessor-args ARGS
Give these arguments to the postprocessor
-k, --keep-video
Keep the video file on disk after the post-processing; the video is erased by
default
--no-post-overwrites
Do not overwrite post-processed files; the post-processed files are overwritten by
default
--embed-subs
Embed subtitles in the video (only for mp4, webm and mkv videos)
--embed-thumbnail
Embed thumbnail in the audio as cover art
--add-metadata
Write metadata to the video file
--metadata-from-title FORMAT
Parse additional metadata like song title / artist from the video title. The
format syntax is the same as --output. Regular expression with named capture
groups may also be used. The parsed parameters replace existing values. Example:
--metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" matches a title like "Coldplay -
Paradise". Example (regex): --metadata-from-title "(?P.+?) - (?P
.+)"
--xattrs
Write metadata to the video file's xattrs (using dublin core and xdg standards)
--fixup POLICY
Automatically correct known faults of the file. One of never (do nothing), warn
(only emit a warning), detect_or_warn (the default; fix file if we can, warn
otherwise)
--prefer-avconv
Prefer avconv over ffmpeg for running the postprocessors
--prefer-ffmpeg
Prefer ffmpeg over avconv for running the postprocessors (default)
--ffmpeg-location PATH
Location of the ffmpeg/avconv binary; either the path to the binary or its
containing directory.
--exec CMD
Execute a command on the file after downloading and post-processing, similar to
find's -exec syntax. Example: --exec 'adb push {} /sdcard/Music/ && rm {}'
--convert-subs FORMAT
Convert the subtitles to other format (currently supported: srt|ass|vtt|lrc)
CONFIGURATION
You can configure youtube-dl by placing any supported command line option to a
configuration file. On Linux and macOS, the system wide configuration file is located at
/etc/youtube-dl.conf and the user wide configuration file at ~/.config/youtube-dl/config.
On Windows, the user wide configuration file locations are %APPDATA%\youtube-dl\config.txt
or C:\Users\<user name>\youtube-dl.conf. Note that by default configuration file may not
exist so you may need to create it yourself.
For example, with the following configuration file youtube-dl will always extract the
audio, not copy the mtime, use a proxy and save all videos under Movies directory in your
home directory:
# Lines starting with # are comments
# Always extract audio
-x
# Do not copy the mtime
--no-mtime
# Use this proxy
--proxy 127.0.0.1:3128
# Save all videos under Movies directory in your home directory
-o ~/Movies/%(title)s.%(ext)s
Note that options in configuration file are just the same options aka switches used in
regular command line calls thus there must be no whitespace after - or --, e.g. -o or
--proxy but not - o or -- proxy.
You can use --ignore-config if you want to disable the configuration file for a particular
youtube-dl run.
You can also use --config-location if you want to use custom configuration file for a
particular youtube-dl run.
Authentication with .netrc file
You may also want to configure automatic credentials storage for extractors that support
authentication (by providing login and password with --username and --password) in order
not to pass credentials as command line arguments on every youtube-dl execution and
prevent tracking plain text passwords in the shell command history. You can achieve this
using a .netrc file (https://stackoverflow.com/tags/.netrc/info) on a per extractor basis.
For that you will need to create a .netrc file in your $HOME and restrict permissions to
read/write by only you:
touch $HOME/.netrc
chmod a-rwx,u+rw $HOME/.netrc
After that you can add credentials for an extractor in the following format, where
extractor is the name of the extractor in lowercase:
machine <extractor> login <login> password <password>
For example:
machine youtube login myaccount@gmail.com password my_youtube_password
machine twitch login my_twitch_account_name password my_twitch_password
To activate authentication with the .netrc file you should pass --netrc to youtube-dl or
place it in the configuration file.
On Windows you may also need to setup the %HOME% environment variable manually. For
example:
set HOME=%USERPROFILE%
OUTPUT TEMPLATE
The -o option allows users to indicate a template for the output file names.
tl;dr: navigate me to examples.
The basic usage is not to set any template arguments when downloading a single file, like
in youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "https://some/video". However, it may contain special
sequences that will be replaced when downloading each video. The special sequences may be
formatted according to python string formatting operations
(https://docs.python.org/2/library/stdtypes.html#string-formatting). For example,
%(NAME)s or %(NAME)05d. To clarify, that is a percent symbol followed by a name in
parentheses, followed by formatting operations. Allowed names along with sequence type
are:
• id (string): Video identifier
• title (string): Video title
• url (string): Video URL
• ext (string): Video filename extension
• alt_title (string): A secondary title of the video
• display_id (string): An alternative identifier for the video
• uploader (string): Full name of the video uploader
• license (string): License name the video is licensed under
• creator (string): The creator of the video
• release_date (string): The date (YYYYMMDD) when the video was released
• timestamp (numeric): UNIX timestamp of the moment the video became available
• upload_date (string): Video upload date (YYYYMMDD)
• uploader_id (string): Nickname or id of the video uploader
• channel (string): Full name of the channel the video is uploaded on
• channel_id (string): Id of the channel
• location (string): Physical location where the video was filmed
• duration (numeric): Length of the video in seconds
• view_count (numeric): How many users have watched the video on the platform
• like_count (numeric): Number of positive ratings of the video
• dislike_count (numeric): Number of negative ratings of the video
• repost_count (numeric): Number of reposts of the video
• average_rating (numeric): Average rating give by users, the scale used depends on the
webpage
• comment_count (numeric): Number of comments on the video
• age_limit (numeric): Age restriction for the video (years)
• is_live (boolean): Whether this video is a live stream or a fixed-length video
• start_time (numeric): Time in seconds where the reproduction should start, as specified
in the URL
• end_time (numeric): Time in seconds where the reproduction should end, as specified in
the URL
• format (string): A human-readable description of the format
• format_id (string): Format code specified by --format
• format_note (string): Additional info about the format
• width (numeric): Width of the video
• height (numeric): Height of the video
• resolution (string): Textual description of width and height
• tbr (numeric): Average bitrate of audio and video in KBit/s
• abr (numeric): Average audio bitrate in KBit/s
• acodec (string): Name of the audio codec in use
• asr (numeric): Audio sampling rate in Hertz
• vbr (numeric): Average video bitrate in KBit/s
• fps (numeric): Frame rate
• vcodec (string): Name of the video codec in use
• container (string): Name of the container format
• filesize (numeric): The number of bytes, if known in advance
• filesize_approx (numeric): An estimate for the number of bytes
• protocol (string): The protocol that will be used for the actual download
• extractor (string): Name of the extractor
• extractor_key (string): Key name of the extractor
• epoch (numeric): Unix epoch when creating the file
• autonumber (numeric): Number that will be increased with each download, starting at
--autonumber-start
• playlist (string): Name or id of the playlist that contains the video
• playlist_index (numeric): Index of the video in the playlist padded with leading zeros
according to the total length of the playlist
• playlist_id (string): Playlist identifier
• playlist_title (string): Playlist title
• playlist_uploader (string): Full name of the playlist uploader
• playlist_uploader_id (string): Nickname or id of the playlist uploader
Available for the video that belongs to some logical chapter or section:
• chapter (string): Name or title of the chapter the video belongs to
• chapter_number (numeric): Number of the chapter the video belongs to
• chapter_id (string): Id of the chapter the video belongs to
Available for the video that is an episode of some series or programme:
• series (string): Title of the series or programme the video episode belongs to
• season (string): Title of the season the video episode belongs to
• season_number (numeric): Number of the season the video episode belongs to
• season_id (string): Id of the season the video episode belongs to
• episode (string): Title of the video episode
• episode_number (numeric): Number of the video episode within a season
• episode_id (string): Id of the video episode
Available for the media that is a track or a part of a music album:
• track (string): Title of the track
• track_number (numeric): Number of the track within an album or a disc
• track_id (string): Id of the track
• artist (string): Artist(s) of the track
• genre (string): Genre(s) of the track
• album (string): Title of the album the track belongs to
• album_type (string): Type of the album
• album_artist (string): List of all artists appeared on the album
• disc_number (numeric): Number of the disc or other physical medium the track belongs to
• release_year (numeric): Year (YYYY) when the album was released
Each aforementioned sequence when referenced in an output template will be replaced by the
actual value corresponding to the sequence name. Note that some of the sequences are not
guaranteed to be present since they depend on the metadata obtained by a particular
extractor. Such sequences will be replaced with placeholder value provided with --output-
na-placeholder (NA by default).
For example for -o %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s and an mp4 video with title youtube-dl test
video and id BaW_jenozKcj, this will result in a youtube-dl test video-BaW_jenozKcj.mp4
file created in the current directory.
For numeric sequences you can use numeric related formatting, for example,
%(view_count)05d will result in a string with view count padded with zeros up to 5
characters, like in 00042.
Output templates can also contain arbitrary hierarchical path, e.g. -o
'%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' which will result in downloading
each video in a directory corresponding to this path template. Any missing directory will
be automatically created for you.
To use percent literals in an output template use %%. To output to stdout use -o -.
The current default template is %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s.
In some cases, you don't want special characters such as 中, spaces, or &, such as when
transferring the downloaded filename to a Windows system or the filename through an 8bit-
unsafe channel. In these cases, add the --restrict-filenames flag to get a shorter title:
Output template and Windows batch files
If you are using an output template inside a Windows batch file then you must escape plain
percent characters (%) by doubling, so that -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" should become -o
"%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s". However you should not touch %'s that are not plain
characters, e.g. environment variables for expansion should stay intact: -o
"C:\%HOMEPATH%\Desktop\%%(title)s.%%(ext)s".
Output template examples
Note that on Windows you may need to use double quotes instead of single.
$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' BaW_jenozKc
youtube-dl test video ''_ä↭𝕐.mp4 # All kinds of weird characters
$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' BaW_jenozKc --restrict-filenames
youtube-dl_test_video_.mp4 # A simple file name
# Download YouTube playlist videos in separate directory indexed by video order in a playlist
$ youtube-dl -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re
# Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory:
$ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists
# Download Udemy course keeping each chapter in separate directory under MyVideos directory in your home
$ youtube-dl -u user -p password -o '~/MyVideos/%(playlist)s/%(chapter_number)s - %(chapter)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.udemy.com/java-tutorial/
# Download entire series season keeping each series and each season in separate directory under C:/MyVideos
$ youtube-dl -o "C:/MyVideos/%(series)s/%(season_number)s - %(season)s/%(episode_number)s - %(episode)s.%(ext)s" https://videomore.ru/kino_v_detalayah/5_sezon/367617
# Stream the video being downloaded to stdout
$ youtube-dl -o - BaW_jenozKc
FORMAT SELECTION
By default youtube-dl tries to download the best available quality, i.e. if you want the
best quality you don't need to pass any special options, youtube-dl will guess it for you
by default.
But sometimes you may want to download in a different format, for example when you are on
a slow or intermittent connection. The key mechanism for achieving this is so-called
format selection based on which you can explicitly specify desired format, select formats
based on some criterion or criteria, setup precedence and much more.
The general syntax for format selection is --format FORMAT or shorter -f FORMAT where
FORMAT is a selector expression, i.e. an expression that describes format or formats you
would like to download.
tl;dr: navigate me to examples.
The simplest case is requesting a specific format, for example with -f 22 you can download
the format with format code equal to 22. You can get the list of available format codes
for particular video using --list-formats or -F. Note that these format codes are
extractor specific.
You can also use a file extension (currently 3gp, aac, flv, m4a, mp3, mp4, ogg, wav, webm
are supported) to download the best quality format of a particular file extension served
as a single file, e.g. -f webm will download the best quality format with the webm
extension served as a single file.
You can also use special names to select particular edge case formats:
• best: Select the best quality format represented by a single file with video and audio.
• worst: Select the worst quality format represented by a single file with video and
audio.
• bestvideo: Select the best quality video-only format (e.g. DASH video). May not be
available.
• worstvideo: Select the worst quality video-only format. May not be available.
• bestaudio: Select the best quality audio only-format. May not be available.
• worstaudio: Select the worst quality audio only-format. May not be available.
For example, to download the worst quality video-only format you can use -f worstvideo.
If you want to download multiple videos and they don't have the same formats available,
you can specify the order of preference using slashes. Note that slash is left-
associative, i.e. formats on the left hand side are preferred, for example -f 22/17/18
will download format 22 if it's available, otherwise it will download format 17 if it's
available, otherwise it will download format 18 if it's available, otherwise it will
complain that no suitable formats are available for download.
If you want to download several formats of the same video use a comma as a separator, e.g.
-f 22,17,18 will download all these three formats, of course if they are available. Or a
more sophisticated example combined with the precedence feature: -f
136/137/mp4/bestvideo,140/m4a/bestaudio.
You can also filter the video formats by putting a condition in brackets, as in -f
"best[height=720]" (or -f "[filesize>10M]").
The following numeric meta fields can be used with comparisons <, <=, >, >=, = (equals),
!= (not equals):
• filesize: The number of bytes, if known in advance
• width: Width of the video, if known
• height: Height of the video, if known
• tbr: Average bitrate of audio and video in KBit/s
• abr: Average audio bitrate in KBit/s
• vbr: Average video bitrate in KBit/s
• asr: Audio sampling rate in Hertz
• fps: Frame rate
Also filtering work for comparisons = (equals), ^= (starts with), $= (ends with), *=
(contains) and following string meta fields:
• ext: File extension
• acodec: Name of the audio codec in use
• vcodec: Name of the video codec in use
• container: Name of the container format
• protocol: The protocol that will be used for the actual download, lower-case (http,
https, rtsp, rtmp, rtmpe, mms, f4m, ism, http_dash_segments, m3u8, or m3u8_native)
• format_id: A short description of the format
• language: Language code
Any string comparison may be prefixed with negation ! in order to produce an opposite
comparison, e.g. !*= (does not contain).
Note that none of the aforementioned meta fields are guaranteed to be present since this
solely depends on the metadata obtained by particular extractor, i.e. the metadata
offered by the video hoster.
Formats for which the value is not known are excluded unless you put a question mark (?)
after the operator. You can combine format filters, so -f "[height <=? 720][tbr>500]"
selects up to 720p videos (or videos where the height is not known) with a bitrate of at
least 500 KBit/s.
You can merge the video and audio of two formats into a single file using -f <video-
format>+<audio-format> (requires ffmpeg or avconv installed), for example -f
bestvideo+bestaudio will download the best video-only format, the best audio-only format
and mux them together with ffmpeg/avconv.
Format selectors can also be grouped using parentheses, for example if you want to
download the best mp4 and webm formats with a height lower than 480 you can use -f
'(mp4,webm)[height<480]'.
Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26, youtube-dl uses -f
bestvideo+bestaudio/best as the default format selection (see #5447
(https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/5447), #5456 (https://github.com/ytdl-
org/youtube-dl/issues/5456)). If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in
downloading bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file
giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to best and results in
downloading the best available quality served as a single file. best is also needed for
videos that don't come from YouTube because they don't provide the audio and video in two
different files. If you want to only download some DASH formats (for example if you are
not interested in getting videos with a resolution higher than 1080p), you can add -f
bestvideo[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best to your configuration file. Note that if you use
youtube-dl to stream to stdout (and most likely to pipe it to your media player then),
i.e. you explicitly specify output template as -o -, youtube-dl still uses -f best format
selection in order to start content delivery immediately to your player and not to wait
until bestvideo and bestaudio are downloaded and muxed.
If you want to preserve the old format selection behavior (prior to youtube-dl
2015.04.26), i.e. you want to download the best available quality media served as a
single file, you should explicitly specify your choice with -f best. You may want to add
it to the configuration file in order not to type it every time you run youtube-dl.
Format selection examples
Note that on Windows you may need to use double quotes instead of single.
# Download best mp4 format available or any other best if no mp4 available
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best'
# Download best format available but no better than 480p
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[height<=480]+bestaudio/best[height<=480]'
# Download best video only format but no bigger than 50 MB
$ youtube-dl -f 'best[filesize<50M]'
# Download best format available via direct link over HTTP/HTTPS protocol
$ youtube-dl -f '(bestvideo+bestaudio/best)[protocol^=http]'
# Download the best video format and the best audio format without merging them
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo,bestaudio' -o '%(title)s.f%(format_id)s.%(ext)s'
Note that in the last example, an output template is recommended as bestvideo and
bestaudio may have the same file name.
VIDEO SELECTION
Videos can be filtered by their upload date using the options --date, --datebefore or
--dateafter. They accept dates in two formats:
• Absolute dates: Dates in the format YYYYMMDD.
• Relative dates: Dates in the format (now|today)[+-][0-9](day|week|month|year)(s)?
Examples:
# Download only the videos uploaded in the last 6 months
$ youtube-dl --dateafter now-6months
# Download only the videos uploaded on January 1, 1970
$ youtube-dl --date 19700101
$ # Download only the videos uploaded in the 200x decade
$ youtube-dl --dateafter 20000101 --datebefore 20091231
FAQ
How do I update youtube-dl?
If you've followed our manual installation instructions (https://ytdl-
org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html), you can simply run youtube-dl -U (or, on Linux,
sudo youtube-dl -U).
If you have used pip, a simple sudo pip install -U youtube-dl is sufficient to update.
If you have installed youtube-dl using a package manager like apt-get or yum, use the
standard system update mechanism to update. Note that distribution packages are often
outdated. As a rule of thumb, youtube-dl releases at least once a month, and often weekly
or even daily. Simply go to https://yt-dl.org to find out the current version.
Unfortunately, there is nothing we youtube-dl developers can do if your distribution
serves a really outdated version. You can (and should) complain to your distribution in
their bugtracker or support forum.
As a last resort, you can also uninstall the version installed by your package manager and
follow our manual installation instructions. For that, remove the distribution's package,
with a line like
sudo apt-get remove -y youtube-dl
Afterwards, simply follow our manual installation instructions (https://ytdl-
org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html):
sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
hash -r
Again, from then on you'll be able to update with sudo youtube-dl -U.
youtube-dl is extremely slow to start on Windows
Add a file exclusion for youtube-dl.exe in Windows Defender settings.
I'm getting an error Unable to extract OpenGraph title on YouTube playlists
YouTube changed their playlist format in March 2014 and later on, so you'll need at least
youtube-dl 2014.07.25 to download all YouTube videos.
If you have installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball,
please use that to update. Note that Ubuntu packages do not seem to get updated anymore.
Since we are not affiliated with Ubuntu, there is little we can do. Feel free to report
bugs (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/youtube-dl/+filebug) to the Ubuntu
packaging people (mailto:ubuntu-
motu@lists.ubuntu.com?subject=outdated%20version%20of%20youtube-dl) - all they have to do
is update the package to a somewhat recent version. See above for a way to update.
I'm getting an error when trying to use output template: error: using output template
conflicts with using title, video ID or auto number
Make sure you are not using -o with any of these options -t, --title, --id, -A or --auto-
number set in command line or in a configuration file. Remove the latter if any.
Do I always have to pass -citw?
By default, youtube-dl intends to have the best options (incidentally, if you have a
convincing case that these should be different, please file an issue where you explain
that (https://yt-dl.org/bug)). Therefore, it is unnecessary and sometimes harmful to copy
long option strings from webpages. In particular, the only option out of -citw that is
regularly useful is -i.
Can you please put the -b option back?
Most people asking this question are not aware that youtube-dl now defaults to downloading
the highest available quality as reported by YouTube, which will be 1080p or 720p in some
cases, so you no longer need the -b option. For some specific videos, maybe YouTube does
not report them to be available in a specific high quality format you're interested in.
In that case, simply request it with the -f option and youtube-dl will try to download it.
I get HTTP error 402 when trying to download a video. What's this?
Apparently YouTube requires you to pass a CAPTCHA test if you download too much. We're
considering to provide a way to let you solve the CAPTCHA (https://github.com/ytdl-
org/youtube-dl/issues/154), but at the moment, your best course of action is pointing a
web browser to the youtube URL, solving the CAPTCHA, and restart youtube-dl.
Do I need any other programs?
youtube-dl works fine on its own on most sites. However, if you want to convert
video/audio, you'll need avconv (https://libav.org/) or ffmpeg (https://www.ffmpeg.org/).
On some sites - most notably YouTube - videos can be retrieved in a higher quality format
without sound. youtube-dl will detect whether avconv/ffmpeg is present and automatically
pick the best option.
Videos or video formats streamed via RTMP protocol can only be downloaded when rtmpdump
(https://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/) is installed. Downloading MMS and RTSP videos requires
either mplayer (https://mplayerhq.hu/) or mpv (https://mpv.io/) to be installed.
I have downloaded a video but how can I play it?
Once the video is fully downloaded, use any video player, such as mpv (https://mpv.io/),
vlc (https://www.videolan.org/) or mplayer (https://www.mplayerhq.hu/).
I extracted a video URL with -g, but it does not play on another machine / in my web browser.
It depends a lot on the service. In many cases, requests for the video (to download/play
it) must come from the same IP address and with the same cookies and/or HTTP headers. Use
the --cookies option to write the required cookies into a file, and advise your downloader
to read cookies from that file. Some sites also require a common user agent to be used,
use --dump-user-agent to see the one in use by youtube-dl. You can also get necessary
cookies and HTTP headers from JSON output obtained with --dump-json.
It may be beneficial to use IPv6; in some cases, the restrictions are only applied to
IPv4. Some services (sometimes only for a subset of videos) do not restrict the video URL
by IP address, cookie, or user-agent, but these are the exception rather than the rule.
Please bear in mind that some URL protocols are not supported by browsers out of the box,
including RTMP. If you are using -g, your own downloader must support these as well.
If you want to play the video on a machine that is not running youtube-dl, you can relay
the video content from the machine that runs youtube-dl. You can use -o - to let youtube-
dl stream a video to stdout, or simply allow the player to download the files written by
youtube-dl in turn.
ERROR: no fmt_url_map or conn information found in video info
YouTube has switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old
versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl.
ERROR: unable to download video
YouTube requires an additional signature since September 2012 which is not supported by
old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl.
Video URL contains an ampersand and I'm getting some strange output [1] 2839 or 'v' is not
recognized as an internal or external command
That's actually the output from your shell. Since ampersand is one of the special shell
characters it's interpreted by the shell preventing you from passing the whole URL to
youtube-dl. To disable your shell from interpreting the ampersands (or any other special
characters) you have to either put the whole URL in quotes or escape them with a backslash
(which approach will work depends on your shell).
For example if your URL is https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc you should end
up with following command:
youtube-dl 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc'
or
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4\&v=BaW_jenozKc
For Windows you have to use the double quotes:
youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc"
ExtractorError: Could not find JS function u'OF'
In February 2015, the new YouTube player contained a character sequence in a string that
was misinterpreted by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl.
HTTP Error 429: Too Many Requests or 402: Payment Required
These two error codes indicate that the service is blocking your IP address because of
overuse. Usually this is a soft block meaning that you can gain access again after
solving CAPTCHA. Just open a browser and solve a CAPTCHA the service suggests you and
after that pass cookies to youtube-dl. Note that if your machine has multiple external
IPs then you should also pass exactly the same IP you've used for solving CAPTCHA with
--source-address. Also you may need to pass a User-Agent HTTP header of your browser with
--user-agent.
If this is not the case (no CAPTCHA suggested to solve by the service) then you can
contact the service and ask them to unblock your IP address, or - if you have acquired a
whitelisted IP address already - use the --proxy or --source-address options to select
another IP address.
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character
The error
File "youtube-dl", line 2
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x93' ...
means you're using an outdated version of Python. Please update to Python 2.6 or 2.7.
What is this binary file? Where has the code gone?
Since June 2012 (#342 (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/342)) youtube-dl is
packed as an executable zipfile, simply unzip it (might need renaming to youtube-dl.zip
first on some systems) or clone the git repository, as laid out above. If you modify the
code, you can run it by executing the __main__.py file. To recompile the executable, run
make youtube-dl.
The exe throws an error due to missing MSVCR100.dll
To run the exe you need to install first the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1
Redistributable Package (x86)
(https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/5/165255E7-1014-4D0A-
B094-B6A430A6BFFC/vcredist_x86.exe).
On Windows, how should I set up ffmpeg and youtube-dl? Where should I put the exe files?
If you put youtube-dl and ffmpeg in the same directory that you're running the command
from, it will work, but that's rather cumbersome.
To make a different directory work - either for ffmpeg, or for youtube-dl, or for both -
simply create the directory (say, C:\bin, or C:\Users\<User name>\bin), put all the
executables directly in there, and then set your PATH environment variable
(https://www.java.com/en/download/help/path.xml) to include that directory.
From then on, after restarting your shell, you will be able to access both youtube-dl and
ffmpeg (and youtube-dl will be able to find ffmpeg) by simply typing youtube-dl or ffmpeg,
no matter what directory you're in.
How do I put downloads into a specific folder?
Use the -o to specify an output template, for example -o
"/home/user/videos/%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s". If you want this for all of your downloads,
put the option into your configuration file.
How do I download a video starting with a -?
Either prepend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= or separate the ID from the options with
--:
youtube-dl -- -wNyEUrxzFU
youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wNyEUrxzFU"
How do I pass cookies to youtube-dl?
Use the --cookies option, for example --cookies /path/to/cookies/file.txt.
In order to extract cookies from browser use any conforming browser extension for
exporting cookies. For example, Get cookies.txt
(https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-
cookiestxt/bgaddhkoddajcdgocldbbfleckgcbcid/) (for Chrome) or cookies.txt
(https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookies-txt/) (for Firefox).
Note that the cookies file must be in Mozilla/Netscape format and the first line of the
cookies file must be either # HTTP Cookie File or # Netscape HTTP Cookie File. Make sure
you have correct newline format (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newline) in the cookies
file and convert newlines if necessary to correspond with your OS, namely CRLF (\r\n) for
Windows and LF (\n) for Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, macOS, etc.). HTTP Error 400:
Bad Request when using --cookies is a good sign of invalid newline format.
Passing cookies to youtube-dl is a good way to workaround login when a particular
extractor does not implement it explicitly. Another use case is working around CAPTCHA
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAPTCHA) some websites require you to solve in particular
cases in order to get access (e.g. YouTube, CloudFlare).
How do I stream directly to media player?
You will first need to tell youtube-dl to stream media to stdout with -o -, and also tell
your media player to read from stdin (it must be capable of this for streaming) and then
pipe former to latter. For example, streaming to vlc (https://www.videolan.org/) can be
achieved with:
youtube-dl -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc -
How do I download only new videos from a playlist?
Use download-archive feature. With this feature you should initially download the
complete playlist with --download-archive /path/to/download/archive/file.txt that will
record identifiers of all the videos in a special file. Each subsequent run with the same
--download-archive will download only new videos and skip all videos that have been
downloaded before. Note that only successful downloads are recorded in the file.
For example, at first,
youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"
will download the complete PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re playlist and create a file
archive.txt. Each subsequent run will only download new videos if any:
youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"
Should I add --hls-prefer-native into my config?
When youtube-dl detects an HLS video, it can download it either with the built-in
downloader or ffmpeg. Since many HLS streams are slightly invalid and ffmpeg/youtube-dl
each handle some invalid cases better than the other, there is an option to switch the
downloader if needed.
When youtube-dl knows that one particular downloader works better for a given website,
that downloader will be picked. Otherwise, youtube-dl will pick the best downloader for
general compatibility, which at the moment happens to be ffmpeg. This choice may change
in future versions of youtube-dl, with improvements of the built-in downloader and/or
ffmpeg.
In particular, the generic extractor (used when your website is not in the list of
supported sites by youtube-dl (https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/supportedsites.html)
cannot mandate one specific downloader.
If you put either --hls-prefer-native or --hls-prefer-ffmpeg into your configuration, a
different subset of videos will fail to download correctly. Instead, it is much better to
file an issue (https://yt-dl.org/bug) or a pull request which details why the native or
the ffmpeg HLS downloader is a better choice for your use case.
Can you add support for this anime video site, or site which shows current movies for free?
As a matter of policy (as well as legality), youtube-dl does not include support for
services that specialize in infringing copyright. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot
easily find a video that the service is quite obviously allowed to distribute (i.e. that
has been uploaded by the creator, the creator's distributor, or is published under a free
license), the service is probably unfit for inclusion to youtube-dl.
A note on the service that they don't host the infringing content, but just link to those
who do, is evidence that the service should not be included into youtube-dl. The same
goes for any DMCA note when the whole front page of the service is filled with videos they
are not allowed to distribute. A "fair use" note is equally unconvincing if the service
shows copyright-protected videos in full without authorization.
Support requests for services that do purchase the rights to distribute their content are
perfectly fine though. If in doubt, you can simply include a source that mentions the
legitimate purchase of content.
How can I speed up work on my issue?
(Also known as: Help, my important issue not being solved!) The youtube-dl core developer
team is quite small. While we do our best to solve as many issues as possible, sometimes
that can take quite a while. To speed up your issue, here's what you can do:
First of all, please do report the issue at our issue tracker (https://yt-dl.org/bugs).
That allows us to coordinate all efforts by users and developers, and serves as a unified
point. Unfortunately, the youtube-dl project has grown too large to use personal email as
an effective communication channel.
Please read the bug reporting instructions below. A lot of bugs lack all the necessary
information. If you can, offer proxy, VPN, or shell access to the youtube-dl developers.
If you are able to, test the issue from multiple computers in multiple countries to
exclude local censorship or misconfiguration issues.
If nobody is interested in solving your issue, you are welcome to take matters into your
own hands and submit a pull request (or coerce/pay somebody else to do so).
Feel free to bump the issue from time to time by writing a small comment ("Issue is still
present in youtube-dl version ...from France, but fixed from Belgium"), but please not
more than once a month. Please do not declare your issue as important or urgent.
How can I detect whether a given URL is supported by youtube-dl?
For one, have a look at the list of supported sites. Note that it can sometimes happen
that the site changes its URL scheme (say, from https://example.com/video/1234567 to
https://example.com/v/1234567 ) and youtube-dl reports an URL of a service in that list as
unsupported. In that case, simply report a bug.
It is not possible to detect whether a URL is supported or not. That's because youtube-dl
contains a generic extractor which matches all URLs. You may be tempted to disable,
exclude, or remove the generic extractor, but the generic extractor not only allows users
to extract videos from lots of websites that embed a video from another service, but may
also be used to extract video from a service that it's hosting itself. Therefore, we
neither recommend nor support disabling, excluding, or removing the generic extractor.
If you want to find out whether a given URL is supported, simply call youtube-dl with it.
If you get no videos back, chances are the URL is either not referring to a video or
unsupported. You can find out which by examining the output (if you run youtube-dl on the
console) or catching an UnsupportedError exception if you run it from a Python program.
Why do I need to go through that much red tape when filing bugs?
Before we had the issue template, despite our extensive bug reporting instructions, about
80% of the issue reports we got were useless, for instance because people used ancient
versions hundreds of releases old, because of simple syntactic errors (not in youtube-dl
but in general shell usage), because the problem was already reported multiple times
before, because people did not actually read an error message, even if it said "please
install ffmpeg", because people did not mention the URL they were trying to download and
many more simple, easy-to-avoid problems, many of whom were totally unrelated to youtube-
dl.
youtube-dl is an open-source project manned by too few volunteers, so we'd rather spend
time fixing bugs where we are certain none of those simple problems apply, and where we
can be reasonably confident to be able to reproduce the issue without asking the reporter
repeatedly. As such, the output of youtube-dl -v YOUR_URL_HERE is really all that's
required to file an issue. The issue template also guides you through some basic steps
you can do, such as checking that your version of youtube-dl is current.
DEVELOPER INSTRUCTIONS
Most users do not need to build youtube-dl and can download the builds (https://ytdl-
org.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html) or get them from their distribution.
To run youtube-dl as a developer, you don't need to build anything either. Simply execute
python -m youtube_dl
To run the test, simply invoke your favorite test runner, or execute a test file directly;
any of the following work:
python -m unittest discover
python test/test_download.py
nosetests
See item 6 of new extractor tutorial for how to run extractor specific test cases.
If you want to create a build of youtube-dl yourself, you'll need
• python
• make (only GNU make is supported)
• pandoc
• zip
• nosetests
Adding support for a new site
If you want to add support for a new site, first of all make sure this site is not
dedicated to copyright infringement. youtube-dl does not support such sites thus pull
requests adding support for them will be rejected.
After you have ensured this site is distributing its content legally, you can follow this
quick list (assuming your service is called yourextractor):
1. Fork this repository (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/fork)
2. Check out the source code with:
git clone git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/youtube-dl.git
3. Start a new git branch with
cd youtube-dl
git checkout -b yourextractor
4. Start with this simple template and save it to youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py:
# coding: utf-8
from __future__ import unicode_literals
from .common import InfoExtractor
class YourExtractorIE(InfoExtractor):
_VALID_URL = r'https?://(?:www\.)?yourextractor\.com/watch/(?P<id>[0-9]+)'
_TEST = {
'url': 'https://yourextractor.com/watch/42',
'md5': 'TODO: md5 sum of the first 10241 bytes of the video file (use --test)',
'info_dict': {
'id': '42',
'ext': 'mp4',
'title': 'Video title goes here',
'thumbnail': r're:^https?://.*\.jpg$',
# TODO more properties, either as:
# * A value
# * MD5 checksum; start the string with md5:
# * A regular expression; start the string with re:
# * Any Python type (for example int or float)
}
}
def _real_extract(self, url):
video_id = self._match_id(url)
webpage = self._download_webpage(url, video_id)
# TODO more code goes here, for example ...
title = self._html_search_regex(r'<h1>(.+?)</h1>', webpage, 'title')
return {
'id': video_id,
'title': title,
'description': self._og_search_description(webpage),
'uploader': self._search_regex(r'<div[^>]+id="uploader"[^>]*>([^<]+)<', webpage, 'uploader', fatal=False),
# TODO more properties (see youtube_dl/extractor/common.py)
}
5. Add an import in youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py (https://github.com/ytdl-
org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py).
6. Run python test/test_download.py TestDownload.test_YourExtractor. This should fail at
first, but you can continually re-run it until you're done. If you decide to add more
than one test, then rename _TEST to _TESTS and make it into a list of dictionaries.
The tests will then be named TestDownload.test_YourExtractor,
TestDownload.test_YourExtractor_1, TestDownload.test_YourExtractor_2, etc. Note that
tests with only_matching key in test's dict are not counted in.
7. Have a look at youtube_dl/extractor/common.py (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py) for possible helper methods and a
detailed description of what your extractor should and may return
(https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/7f41a598b3fba1bcab2817de64a08941200aa3c8/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L94-L303).
Add tests and code for as many as you want.
8. Make sure your code follows youtube-dl coding conventions and check the code with
flake8 (https://flake8.pycqa.org/en/latest/index.html#quickstart):
$ flake8 youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py
9. Make sure your code works under all Python (https://www.python.org/) versions claimed
supported by youtube-dl, namely 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2+.
10. When the tests pass, add (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-add) the new files and commit
(https://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit) them and push (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-
push) the result, like this:
$ git add youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py
$ git add youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py
$ git commit -m '[yourextractor] Add new extractor'
$ git push origin yourextractor
11. Finally, create a pull request (https://help.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-
request). We'll then review and merge it.
In any case, thank you very much for your contributions!
youtube-dl coding conventions
This section introduces a guide lines for writing idiomatic, robust and future-proof
extractor code.
Extractors are very fragile by nature since they depend on the layout of the source data
provided by 3rd party media hosters out of your control and this layout tends to change.
As an extractor implementer your task is not only to write code that will extract media
links and metadata correctly but also to minimize dependency on the source's layout and
even to make the code foresee potential future changes and be ready for that. This is
important because it will allow the extractor not to break on minor layout changes thus
keeping old youtube-dl versions working. Even though this breakage issue is easily fixed
by emitting a new version of youtube-dl with a fix incorporated, all the previous versions
become broken in all repositories and distros' packages that may not be so prompt in
fetching the update from us. Needless to say, some non rolling release distros may never
receive an update at all.
Mandatory and optional metafields
For extraction to work youtube-dl relies on metadata your extractor extracts and provides
to youtube-dl expressed by an information dictionary (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/7f41a598b3fba1bcab2817de64a08941200aa3c8/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L94-L303)
or simply info dict. Only the following meta fields in the info dict are considered
mandatory for a successful extraction process by youtube-dl:
• id (media identifier)
• title (media title)
• url (media download URL) or formats
In fact only the last option is technically mandatory (i.e. if you can't figure out the
download location of the media the extraction does not make any sense). But by convention
youtube-dl also treats id and title as mandatory. Thus the aforementioned metafields are
the critical data that the extraction does not make any sense without and if any of them
fail to be extracted then the extractor is considered completely broken.
Any field (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/7f41a598b3fba1bcab2817de64a08941200aa3c8/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L188-L303)
apart from the aforementioned ones are considered optional. That means that extraction
should be tolerant to situations when sources for these fields can potentially be
unavailable (even if they are always available at the moment) and future-proof in order
not to break the extraction of general purpose mandatory fields.
Example
Say you have some source dictionary meta that you've fetched as JSON with HTTP request and
it has a key summary:
meta = self._download_json(url, video_id)
Assume at this point meta's layout is:
{
...
"summary": "some fancy summary text",
...
}
Assume you want to extract summary and put it into the resulting info dict as description.
Since description is an optional meta field you should be ready that this key may be
missing from the meta dict, so that you should extract it like:
description = meta.get('summary') # correct
and not like:
description = meta['summary'] # incorrect
The latter will break extraction process with KeyError if summary disappears from meta at
some later time but with the former approach extraction will just go ahead with
description set to None which is perfectly fine (remember None is equivalent to the
absence of data).
Similarly, you should pass fatal=False when extracting optional data from a webpage with
_search_regex, _html_search_regex or similar methods, for instance:
description = self._search_regex(
r'<span[^>]+id="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)<',
webpage, 'description', fatal=False)
With fatal set to False if _search_regex fails to extract description it will emit a
warning and continue extraction.
You can also pass default=<some fallback value>, for example:
description = self._search_regex(
r'<span[^>]+id="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)<',
webpage, 'description', default=None)
On failure this code will silently continue the extraction with description set to None.
That is useful for metafields that may or may not be present.
Provide fallbacks
When extracting metadata try to do so from multiple sources. For example if title is
present in several places, try extracting from at least some of them. This makes it more
future-proof in case some of the sources become unavailable.
Example
Say meta from the previous example has a title and you are about to extract it. Since
title is a mandatory meta field you should end up with something like:
title = meta['title']
If title disappears from meta in future due to some changes on the hoster's side the
extraction would fail since title is mandatory. That's expected.
Assume that you have some another source you can extract title from, for example og:title
HTML meta of a webpage. In this case you can provide a fallback scenario:
title = meta.get('title') or self._og_search_title(webpage)
This code will try to extract from meta first and if it fails it will try extracting
og:title from a webpage.
Regular expressions
Don't capture groups you don't use
Capturing group must be an indication that it's used somewhere in the code. Any group
that is not used must be non capturing.
Example
Don't capture id attribute name here since you can't use it for anything anyway.
Correct:
r'(?:id|ID)=(?P<id>\d+)'
Incorrect:
r'(id|ID)=(?P<id>\d+)'
Make regular expressions relaxed and flexible
When using regular expressions try to write them fuzzy, relaxed and flexible, skipping
insignificant parts that are more likely to change, allowing both single and double quotes
for quoted values and so on.
Example
Say you need to extract title from the following HTML code:
<span style="position: absolute; left: 910px; width: 90px; float: right; z-index: 9999;" class="title">some fancy title</span>
The code for that task should look similar to:
title = self._search_regex(
r'<span[^>]+class="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)', webpage, 'title')
Or even better:
title = self._search_regex(
r'<span[^>]+class=(["\'])title\1[^>]*>(?P<title>[^<]+)',
webpage, 'title', group='title')
Note how you tolerate potential changes in the style attribute's value or switch from
using double quotes to single for class attribute:
The code definitely should not look like:
title = self._search_regex(
r'<span style="position: absolute; left: 910px; width: 90px; float: right; z-index: 9999;" class="title">(.*?)</span>',
webpage, 'title', group='title')
Long lines policy
There is a soft limit to keep lines of code under 80 characters long. This means it
should be respected if possible and if it does not make readability and code maintenance
worse.
For example, you should never split long string literals like URLs or some other often
copied entities over multiple lines to fit this limit:
Correct:
'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZTN594JQw&list=PLMYEtVRpaqY00V9W81Cwmzp6N6vZqfUKD4'
Incorrect:
'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZTN594JQw&list='
'PLMYEtVRpaqY00V9W81Cwmzp6N6vZqfUKD4'
Inline values
Extracting variables is acceptable for reducing code duplication and improving readability
of complex expressions. However, you should avoid extracting variables used only once and
moving them to opposite parts of the extractor file, which makes reading the linear flow
difficult.
Example
Correct:
title = self._html_search_regex(r'<title>([^<]+)</title>', webpage, 'title')
Incorrect:
TITLE_RE = r'<title>([^<]+)</title>'
# ...some lines of code...
title = self._html_search_regex(TITLE_RE, webpage, 'title')
Collapse fallbacks
Multiple fallback values can quickly become unwieldy. Collapse multiple fallback values
into a single expression via a list of patterns.
Example
Good:
description = self._html_search_meta(
['og:description', 'description', 'twitter:description'],
webpage, 'description', default=None)
Unwieldy:
description = (
self._og_search_description(webpage, default=None)
or self._html_search_meta('description', webpage, default=None)
or self._html_search_meta('twitter:description', webpage, default=None))
Methods supporting list of patterns are: _search_regex, _html_search_regex,
_og_search_property, _html_search_meta.
Trailing parentheses
Always move trailing parentheses after the last argument.
Example
Correct:
lambda x: x['ResultSet']['Result'][0]['VideoUrlSet']['VideoUrl'],
list)
Incorrect:
lambda x: x['ResultSet']['Result'][0]['VideoUrlSet']['VideoUrl'],
list,
)
Use convenience conversion and parsing functions
Wrap all extracted numeric data into safe functions from youtube_dl/utils.py
(https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/utils.py): int_or_none,
float_or_none. Use them for string to number conversions as well.
Use url_or_none for safe URL processing.
Use try_get for safe metadata extraction from parsed JSON.
Use unified_strdate for uniform upload_date or any YYYYMMDD meta field extraction,
unified_timestamp for uniform timestamp extraction, parse_filesize for filesize
extraction, parse_count for count meta fields extraction, parse_resolution, parse_duration
for duration extraction, parse_age_limit for age_limit extraction.
Explore youtube_dl/utils.py (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/utils.py) for more useful convenience functions.
More examples
Safely extract optional description from parsed JSON
description = try_get(response, lambda x: x['result']['video'][0]['summary'], compat_str)
Safely extract more optional metadata
video = try_get(response, lambda x: x['result']['video'][0], dict) or {}
description = video.get('summary')
duration = float_or_none(video.get('durationMs'), scale=1000)
view_count = int_or_none(video.get('views'))
EMBEDDING YOUTUBE-DL
youtube-dl makes the best effort to be a good command-line program, and thus should be
callable from any programming language. If you encounter any problems parsing its output,
feel free to create a report (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/issues/new).
From a Python program, you can embed youtube-dl in a more powerful fashion, like this:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
import youtube_dl
ydl_opts = {}
with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl:
ydl.download(['https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc'])
Most likely, you'll want to use various options. For a list of options available, have a
look at youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/blob/3e4cedf9e8cd3157df2457df7274d0c842421945/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py#L137-L312). For
a start, if you want to intercept youtube-dl's output, set a logger object.
Here's a more complete example of a program that outputs only errors (and a short message
after the download is finished), and downloads/converts the video to an mp3 file:
from __future__ import unicode_literals
import youtube_dl
class MyLogger(object):
def debug(self, msg):
pass
def warning(self, msg):
pass
def error(self, msg):
print(msg)
def my_hook(d):
if d['status'] == 'finished':
print('Done downloading, now converting ...')
ydl_opts = {
'format': 'bestaudio/best',
'postprocessors': [{
'key': 'FFmpegExtractAudio',
'preferredcodec': 'mp3',
'preferredquality': '192',
}],
'logger': MyLogger(),
'progress_hooks': [my_hook],
}
with youtube_dl.YoutubeDL(ydl_opts) as ydl:
ydl.download(['https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc'])
BUGS
Bugs and suggestions should be reported at: <https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/issues>. Unless you were prompted to or there is another pertinent reason (e.g.
GitHub fails to accept the bug report), please do not send bug reports via personal email.
For discussions, join us in the IRC channel #youtube-dl (irc://chat.freenode.net/#youtube-
dl) on freenode (webchat (https://webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=youtube-
dl)).
Please include the full output of youtube-dl when run with -v, i.e. add -v flag to your
command line, copy the whole output and post it in the issue body wrapped in ``` for
better formatting. It should look similar to this:
$ youtube-dl -v <your command line>
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: [u'-v', u'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj']
[debug] Encodings: locale cp1251, fs mbcs, out cp866, pref cp1251
[debug] youtube-dl version 2015.12.06
[debug] Git HEAD: 135392e
[debug] Python version 2.6.6 - Windows-2003Server-5.2.3790-SP2
[debug] exe versions: ffmpeg N-75573-g1d0487f, ffprobe N-75573-g1d0487f, rtmpdump 2.4
[debug] Proxy map: {}
...
Do not post screenshots of verbose logs; only plain text is acceptable.
The output (including the first lines) contains important debugging information. Issues
without the full output are often not reproducible and therefore do not get solved in
short order, if ever.
Please re-read your issue once again to avoid a couple of common mistakes (you can and
should use this as a checklist):
Is the description of the issue itself sufficient?
We often get issue reports that we cannot really decipher. While in most cases we
eventually get the required information after asking back multiple times, this poses an
unnecessary drain on our resources. Many contributors, including myself, are also not
native speakers, so we may misread some parts.
So please elaborate on what feature you are requesting, or what bug you want to be fixed.
Make sure that it's obvious
• What the problem is
• How it could be fixed
• How your proposed solution would look like
If your report is shorter than two lines, it is almost certainly missing some of these,
which makes it hard for us to respond to it. We're often too polite to close the issue
outright, but the missing info makes misinterpretation likely. As a committer myself, I
often get frustrated by these issues, since the only possible way for me to move forward
on them is to ask for clarification over and over.
For bug reports, this means that your report should contain the complete output of
youtube-dl when called with the -v flag. The error message you get for (most) bugs even
says so, but you would not believe how many of our bug reports do not contain this
information.
If your server has multiple IPs or you suspect censorship, adding --call-home may be a
good idea to get more diagnostics. If the error is ERROR: Unable to extract ... and you
cannot reproduce it from multiple countries, add --dump-pages (warning: this will yield a
rather large output, redirect it to the file log.txt by adding >log.txt 2>&1 to your
command-line) or upload the .dump files you get when you add --write-pages somewhere
(https://gist.github.com/).
Site support requests must contain an example URL. An example URL is a URL you might want
to download, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc. There should be an obvious
video present. Except under very special circumstances, the main page of a video service
(e.g. https://www.youtube.com/) is not an example URL.
Are you using the latest version?
Before reporting any issue, type youtube-dl -U. This should report that you're up-to-
date. About 20% of the reports we receive are already fixed, but people are using
outdated versions. This goes for feature requests as well.
Is the issue already documented?
Make sure that someone has not already opened the issue you're trying to open. Search at
the top of the window or browse the GitHub Issues (https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-
dl/search?type=Issues) of this repository. If there is an issue, feel free to write
something along the lines of "This affects me as well, with version 2015.01.01. Here is
some more information on the issue: ...". While some issues may be old, a new post into
them often spurs rapid activity.
Why are existing options not enough?
Before requesting a new feature, please have a quick peek at the list of supported options
(https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/README.md#options). Many feature
requests are for features that actually exist already! Please, absolutely do show off
your work in the issue report and detail how the existing similar options do not solve
your problem.
Is there enough context in your bug report?
People want to solve problems, and often think they do us a favor by breaking down their
larger problems (e.g. wanting to skip already downloaded files) to a specific request
(e.g. requesting us to look whether the file exists before downloading the info page).
However, what often happens is that they break down the problem into two steps: One
simple, and one impossible (or extremely complicated one).
We are then presented with a very complicated request when the original problem could be
solved far easier, e.g. by recording the downloaded video IDs in a separate file. To
avoid this, you must include the greater context where it is non-obvious. In particular,
every feature request that does not consist of adding support for a new site should
contain a use case scenario that explains in what situation the missing feature would be
useful.
Does the issue involve one problem, and one problem only?
Some of our users seem to think there is a limit of issues they can or should open. There
is no limit of issues they can or should open. While it may seem appealing to be able to
dump all your issues into one ticket, that means that someone who solves one of your
issues cannot mark the issue as closed. Typically, reporting a bunch of issues leads to
the ticket lingering since nobody wants to attack that behemoth, until someone mercifully
splits the issue into multiple ones.
In particular, every site support request issue should only pertain to services at one
site (generally under a common domain, but always using the same backend technology). Do
not request support for vimeo user videos, White house podcasts, and Google Plus pages in
the same issue. Also, make sure that you don't post bug reports alongside feature
requests. As a rule of thumb, a feature request does not include outputs of youtube-dl
that are not immediately related to the feature at hand. Do not post reports of a network
error alongside the request for a new video service.
Is anyone going to need the feature?
Only post features that you (or an incapacitated friend you can personally talk to)
require. Do not post features because they seem like a good idea. If they are really
useful, they will be requested by someone who requires them.
Is your question about youtube-dl?
It may sound strange, but some bug reports we receive are completely unrelated to youtube-
dl and relate to a different, or even the reporter's own, application. Please make sure
that you are actually using youtube-dl. If you are using a UI for youtube-dl, report the
bug to the maintainer of the actual application providing the UI. On the other hand, if
your UI for youtube-dl fails in some way you believe is related to youtube-dl, by all
means, go ahead and report the bug.
COPYRIGHT
youtube-dl is released into the public domain by the copyright holders.
This README file was originally written by Daniel Bolton (https://github.com/dbbolton) and
is likewise released into the public domain.
YOUTUBE-DL(1)