How to install youtube-dl (the easy way)

By JC | March 5, 2018 | Comments 4 comments

youtube-dl is an amazing and useful command line utility to download videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and more. This articles is about how to install youtube-dl on Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX. youtube-dl is written in Python

so it’s also referred to as youtube-dl.py or youtube-dl.exe when compiled on Windows.

youtube-dl depends on ffmpeg or avconv for video transcoding and audio/video merging. We will install ffmpeg in this tutorial since it can be installed via choco on Windows.

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Steps to Install youtube-dl on Windows

Install chocolatey/choco
From a privileged command prompt run

C:\> choco install -y youtube-dl ffmpeg

Verify that youtube-dl is installed and check the version.

C:\> youtube-dl --version

Install youtube-dl Windows — Click to Zoom

Steps to Install youtube-dl on Ubuntu Linux

youtube-dl can be installed on most Linux distributions using the built-in package manager (apt, yum, etc).

# apt based distros Ubuntu, Debian, etc
sudo apt install youtube-dl
# yum based distros Redhat, Centos, Fedora
sudo yum install youtube-dl

Steps to Install youtube-dl on Mac OSX

# OS X users can install youtube-dl with Homebrew:
brew install youtube-dl
# Or with MacPorts:
sudo port install youtube-dl

Steps to Install youtube-dl using python/pip

This method assumes you already have python and pip installed

# python 2.7
sudo pip install youtube-dl
# python 3.x
sudo pip3 install youtube-dl

Download a YouTube video using youtube-dl

Lets give it a try by downloading a youtube video from the command line.

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RpOlTN2xdwg
# output
[youtube] RpOlTN2xdwg: Downloading webpage
[youtube] RpOlTN2xdwg: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] RpOlTN2xdwg: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: Wind turbine spinning in HD 1080p - short clip-RpOlTN2xdwg.f137.mp4
[download] 100% of 8.04MiB in 00:01
[download] Destination: Wind turbine spinning in HD 1080p - short clip-RpOlTN2xdwg.f140.m4a
[download] 100% of 503.80KiB in 00:00
[ffmpeg] Merging formats into "Wind turbine spinning in HD 1080p - short clip-RpOlTN2xdwg.mp4"
Deleting original file Wind turbine spinning in HD 1080p - short clip-RpOlTN2xdwg.f137.mp4 (pass -k to keep)
Deleting original file Wind turbine spinning in HD 1080p - short clip-RpOlTN2xdwg.f140.m4a (pass -k to keep)

Here are the video file’s properties and the downloaded video

What sites can youtube-dl download videos from?

Although the name implies that youtube-dl only works for downloading videos from youtube, I was shocked to discover it supports over 1,000 other websites. Some popular ones include….