Tools
yt-dlp

yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a command-line audio/video downloader. It’s a fork of youtube-dl. Installation instructions can be found here.

Note: Sad thing about downloading from YouTube is, yt-dlp requires a whole Javascript runtime to solve JS challenges. You have to install deno. Plus, you sometimes need --remote-components ejs:github along with the command to get the challenge solver scripts from time to time.

Download

Download a video 

yt-dlp <link>

Downloads bestvideo+bestaudio.

Download audio only 

yt-dlp -x <link> # short for --extract-audio

List Video/Audio Formats 

yt-dlp -F <link>

The result would be something like this: (obviously shortened)

ID      EXT   RESOLUTION FPS CH │   FILESIZE   TBR PROTO │ VCODEC          VBR ACODEC      ABR ASR MORE INFO
──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
140     m4a   audio only  2     │  257.91MiB  129k https │ audio only          mp4a.40.2  129k 44k [en] medium, m4a_dash
251     webm  audio only  2     │  284.16MiB  143k https │ audio only          opus       143k 48k [en] medium, webm_dash
160     mp4   256x144     30    │   43.48MiB   22k https │ avc1.4d400c     22k video only          144p, mp4_dash
278     webm  256x144     30    │   89.44MiB   45k https │ vp9             45k video only          144p, webm_dash
399     mp4   1920x1080   30    │  794.01MiB  399k https │ av01.0.08M.08  399k video only          1080p, mp4_dash
271     webm  2560x1440   30    │    2.71GiB 1392k https │ vp9           1392k video only          1440p, webm_dash
400     mp4   2560x1440   30    │    2.14GiB 1099k https │ av01.0.12M.08 1099k video only          1440p, mp4_dash

Notice the IDs at the beginning. You can use it to download specific ones.

Download video of a specific resolution and/or codec

Quoting from the previous example, suppose I want to download the 1440p AV1 video along with OPUS audio. You could take note of the IDs and download the video like this:

yt-dlp -f 400+251 <link>

You could use bestvideo and bestaudio as well.

Batch download from a file with URLs

Suppose you have a .txt file with a bunch of links in it:

links.txt
https://example.com/video1.mp4
https://example.com/video2.mp4
https://example.com/video3.mp4
https://example.com/video4.mp4

To download every video in the .txt file, you could do:

yt-dlp -a links.txt

apparently, -a is short for --batch-file. (idk bro)

Chapters

Embed chapters

A lot of YouTube videos, especially the long ones, have chapters in them. Use the --embed-chapters flag.

yt-dlp --embed-chapters <link>

Download chapters as separate files 

yt-dlp --split-chapters "URL" -o "%(title)s - %(chapter)s.%(ext)s"

Splits a video based on its chapters and saves it as separate files. Requires FFMpeg.

Get Video URL

Useful for scripting purposes.

yt-dlp -g <link>

Subtitles

Download video with subtitle 

yt-dlp --embed-subs <link>

Download video with auto-generated subtitle 

yt-dlp --write-auto-sub <link>

Download subtitle only 

yt-dlp --write-auto-sub --skip-download <link>
tmuxzoxide