<p>After that, you should be able to call it from the command line as <em>youtube-dl</em>. I will use <em>youtube-dl</em> in the following examples. Usage instructions are easy. Use <em>youtube-dl</em> followed by a video URL or identifier. Example: <em>youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobar"</em>. The video will be saved to the file <em>foobar.flv</em> in that example. As YouTube.com videos are usually in Flash Video format, their extension should be <em>flv</em>. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of <em>ffmpeg</em> can play them. That includes VLC, MPlayer, etc. Those two work under Windows and other platforms, but you could also get a specific FLV player of your taste.</p>
<p>If you try to run the program and you receive an error message containing the keyword <em>SyntaxError</em> near the end, it means your Python interpreter is too old, remember that youtube-dl need Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+.</p>
<p>The program is usually invoked as <em>youtube-dl</em> followed by options and the video URLs. Listing all the options here would make this text too long, so you can run <em>youtube-dl --help</em> and get a summary of them. From that point on you can start experimenting with the different options yourself. The most common ones are -t (or -l) to include the video title in the file name. Also, the -o option can specify the output file name and path. It allows special character sequences that can be used as templates to be replaced. See the "Output template" section for more details.</p>
<p>Some YouTube videos are served using Adobe's proprietary RTMP protocol, which imposes DRM restrictions and encrypts the connection. <em>youtube-dl</em> is not able to download these videos by itself. However, it will attempt to use the <ahref="http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/">rtmpdump</a> program, if it's installed in your system, to download these videos.</p>
<p>The <ahref="faq.html">Frequently Asked Questions</a> page contains answers to some common questions that pop up in my e-mail and in the <ahref="https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues">issue tracker</a>. Be sure to check it before reporting problems.</p>
<p>youtube-dl supports downloading videos through a proxy, by setting the <em>http_proxy</em> environment variable to the proxy URL, as in <code>http://proxy_machine_name:port/</code>.</p>
<p>Using the -f option and other related options, you can specify the video format to be downloaded. Add the <code>-F</code> option to see all valid formats. If you have an order of preference other than best quality, specify the formats separating them with slashes: <code>-f 22/17/18</code>. You can also pass in an extension, like <code>-f mp4/webm</code>.</p>
<p>The -o option allows users to indicate a template for the output file names. The basic usage is not to set any template arguments when downloading a single file, like in <em>youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "http://some/video"</em>. However, it may contain special sequences that will be replaced when downloading each video. The special sequences have the format <strong>%(NAME)s</strong>. To clarify, that's a percent symbol followed by a name in parenthesis, followed by a lowercase S. Allowed names are:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>id</em>: The sequence will be replaced by the video identifier.</li>
<li><em>url</em>: The sequence will be replaced by the video URL.</li>
<li><em>uploader</em>: The sequence will be replaced by the nickname of the person who uploaded the video.</li>
<p>The current default template is <em>%(id)s.%(ext)s</em>, but that will be switchted to <em>%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s</em> (which can be requested with <code>-t</code> at the moment).</p>
<p>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 <code>--restrict-filenames</code> flag to get a shorter title:</p>
<spanstyle="color: #004;">youtube-dl test video ''_ä↭𝕐.mp4</span> <spanstyle="color: #666;"># All kinds of weird characters</span>
You can configure youtube-dl by placing default arguments (such as <code>--extract-audio --no-mtime</code> to always extract the audio and not copy the mtime) into <code>/etc/youtube-dl.conf</code> and/or <code>~/.config/youtube-dl.conf</code>. Arguments in these files may be written across multiple lines, and any line beginning with the <code>#</code> character will be treated as a comment.
