Downloading your favourity flash video from
Youtube with a simple command (youtube-dl)
Watching videos in youtube today and already for about 2 years is
the de-facto hype.
There is almost none a day passed without almost each one of us has
watched a dozen videos in
Youtube.
Watching videos in youtube has become even more addictive for many
than the early days of
Internet Relay Chats (IRC)
As youtube is very accessible for people and it's a comparativily
easy way people share more and more with the day.
There is no question that the business idea of youtube is great and
youtube generates millions of dollars for Google day by day,
however I have a serious objection here! All is good the only
pitfall is that you don't own the youtube videos you
watch!
Youtube's story is not that different from
the story of the cloud computing threat to internet users
Freedom
The good thing here is that we're not still completely dependant on
youtube and there is still way to retrieve your favourite youtube
video and store it for later watching or distribution.
Probably the most famous browser plugin that allows files retrieval
from youtube, as most people know is
DownloadHelper .
However using download helper is browser dependant, you need to use
the browser to save the plugin and
I don't find it to be the
best way to download a youtube video.
Since the old days I have started using Linux,
I've been quite
addicted to as many things on my linux as possible from the command
line (terminal / console) (CLI) .
In that manner of thoughts it was a real delight for me to find out
that a group of free software developer guys has come up with a
command line tool that allows downloads of youtube videos
straight from terminal, the great software is called
youtube-dl and at the moment of this post writting it's to
be found on the URL address:
http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
Youtube-dl is written in python so, it requires the Python
interpreter, version 2.5 in order to properly run on Unix, Mac OS X
or even on Windows!
The fact that it's written in python has made the little shiny tool
quite a multi-platform one.
To start using immediately the tool on a Debian or Ubuntu Linux you
will have to install python (even though in most cases you must
have it already installed):
1. To make sure you have
python interpreter installed issue
the cmd:
debian:~# apt-get install python
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
python is already the newest version.
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not
upgraded.
As you can see from above apt-get's output I do have it installed
so nothing gets installed.
2. As a next step I used links to download the
youtube-dl python
script, like so:
debian:~# links
https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/raw/2011.03.29/youtube-dl
>> youtube-dl
Use the links interface to save youtube-dl and use gzip to
ungzip it
debian:~# gzip -d youtube-dl.gz
debian:~# chmod +x youtube-dl
Now to make it system wide accessible I have copied the
youtube-dl to
/usr/local/bin , whether I selected
/usr/local/bin as a location as this location is
predetermined to contain mostly files which does not belong to a
regular deb package.
3. Move youtube-dl to
/usr/local/bin
debian:~# mv youtube-dl /usr/local/bin
4. Test the newly installed youtube-dl command line youtube
retrieval tool:
debian:~# ./youtube-dl
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 53.3% of 22.62M at 33.23k/s ETA 05:25
[download] 100.0% of 22.62M at 31.91k/s ETA 00:00
[u
As you might have noticed from the above youtube-dl command output
the newly retrieved youtube file will be saved under a name
g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
The line I passed to youtube-dl is directly taken from my browser
and pasted to console, the file downloading from youtube took me
about 10 minutes but this is mostly because of some kind of youtube
server speed restrictions ...
In general at least I have this video for later, watching, so after
a while I can watch it once again without loosing a lot of time
trying to remember what was the video headline name
5. To use youtube-dl in a bit advanced way you can for instance
invoke the command with options like:
debian:~# ./youtube-dl -l -w -c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7tvI6JCXD0
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] g7tvI6JCXD0: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: BSD is Dying, Jason Dixon, NYCBSDCon
2007-g7tvI6JCXD0.flv
[download] 4.4% of 22.62M at 1.43M/s ETA 00:15
As you can see now
youtube-dl was even able to detect the
downloaded video file name and store it on the computer with a
correct name ;)
I would recommend you also to check out the youtube-dl help page,
to do so issue:
youtube-dl --help