sudo pip install youtube-dl
-Alternatively, refer to the [developer instructions](#developer-instructions) for how to check out and work with the git repository. For further options, including PGP signatures, see https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html .
+Alternatively, refer to the [developer instructions](#developer-instructions) for how to check out and work with the git repository. For further options, including PGP signatures, see the [youtube-dl Download Page](https://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html).
# DESCRIPTION
**youtube-dl** is a small command-line program to download videos from
--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
+ -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.
## Subtitle Options:
--write-sub Write subtitle file
- --write-auto-sub Write automatic subtitle file (YouTube
- only)
+ --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
# CONFIGURATION
-You can configure youtube-dl by placing any supported command line option to a configuration file. On Linux, system wide configuration file is located at `/etc/youtube-dl.conf` and 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`. For example, with the following configration file youtube-dl will always extract the audio, not copy the mtime and use proxy:
+You can configure youtube-dl by placing any supported command line option to a configuration file. On Linux, 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`. For example, with the following configuration file youtube-dl will always extract the audio, not copy the mtime and use a proxy:
```
--extract-audio
--no-mtime
--proxy 127.0.0.1:3128
```
-You can use `--ignore-config` if you want to disable configuration file for a particular youtube-dl run.
+You can use `--ignore-config` if you want to disable the configuration file for a particular youtube-dl run.
-### Authentication with `.netrc` file ###
+### 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 shell command history. You can achieve this using [`.netrc` file](http://stackoverflow.com/tags/.netrc/info) on per extractor basis. For that you will need to create `.netrc` file in your `$HOME` and restrict permissions to read/write by you only:
+You may also want to configure automatic credentials storage for extractors that support authentication (by providing login and password with `--username` and `--password`) in order not to pass credentials as command line arguments on every youtube-dl execution and prevent tracking plain text passwords in the shell command history. You can achieve this using a [`.netrc` file](http://stackoverflow.com/tags/.netrc/info) on per extractor basis. For that you will need to create a`.netrc` file in your `$HOME` and restrict permissions to read/write by you only:
```
touch $HOME/.netrc
chmod a-rwx,u+rw $HOME/.netrc
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 `.netrc` file you should pass `--netrc` to youtube-dl or place it in [configuration file](#configuration).
+To activate authentication with the `.netrc` file you should pass `--netrc` to youtube-dl or place it in the [configuration file](#configuration).
-On Windows you may also need to setup `%HOME%` environment variable manually.
+On Windows you may also need to setup the `%HOME%` environment variable manually.
# OUTPUT TEMPLATE
-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 `youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "http://some/video"`. However, it may contain special sequences that will be replaced when downloading each video. The special sequences have the format `%(NAME)s`. To clarify, that is a percent symbol followed by a name in parenthesis, followed by a lowercase S. Allowed names are:
+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 `youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "http://some/video"`. However, it may contain special sequences that will be replaced when downloading each video. The special sequences have the format `%(NAME)s`. To clarify, that is a percent symbol followed by a name in parentheses, followed by a lowercase S. Allowed names are:
- `id`: The sequence will be replaced by the video identifier.
- `url`: The sequence will be replaced by the video URL.
# FORMAT SELECTION
-By default youtube-dl tries to download the best quality, but sometimes you may want to download other format.
+By default youtube-dl tries to download the best quality, but sometimes you may want to download in a different format.
The simplest case is requesting a specific format, for example `-f 22`. You can get the list of available formats using `--list-formats`, you can also use a file extension (currently it supports aac, m4a, mp3, mp4, ogg, wav, webm) or the special names `best`, `bestvideo`, `bestaudio` and `worst`.
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, as in `-f 22/17/18`. You can also filter the video results by putting a condition in brackets, as in `-f "best[height=720]"` (or `-f "[filesize>10M]"`). This works for filesize, height, width, tbr, abr, vbr, asr, and fps and the comparisons <, <=, >, >=, =, != and for ext, acodec, vcodec, container, and protocol and the comparisons =, != . 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. Use commas to download multiple formats, such as `-f 136/137/mp4/bestvideo,140/m4a/bestaudio`. You can merge the video and audio of two formats into a single file using `-f <video-format>+<audio-format>` (requires ffmpeg or avconv), for example `-f bestvideo+bestaudio`. 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 default format selection (see #5447, #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 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.
+Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses `-f bestvideo+bestaudio/best` as default format selection (see #5447, #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 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](#configuration) in order not to type it every time you run youtube-dl.
+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](#configuration) in order not to type it every time you run youtube-dl.
# VIDEO SELECTION
-Videos can be filtered by their upload date using the options `--date`, `--datebefore` or `--dateafter`, they accept dates in two formats:
+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)?`
# Download only the videos uploaded on January 1, 1970
$ youtube-dl --date 19700101
-$ # will only download the videos uploaded in the 200x decade
+$ # Download only the videos uploaded in the 200x decade
$ youtube-dl --dateafter 20000101 --datebefore 20091231
```
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 http://yt-dl.org/ to find out the current version. Unfortunately, there is nothing we youtube-dl developers can do if your distributions serves a really outdated version. You can (and should) complain to your distribution in their bugtracker or support forum.
+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 http://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
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/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/154), but at the moment, your best course of action is pointing a webbrowser 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](http://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 [vlc](http://www.videolan.org) or [mplayer](http://www.mplayerhq.hu/).
YouTube has switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. See [above](#how-do-i-update-youtube-dl) for how to update youtube-dl.
-### ERROR: unable to download video ###
+### 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](#how-do-i-update-youtube-dl) 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` ###
+### 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 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).
+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:
These two error codes indicate that the service is blocking your IP address because of overuse. 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](#network-options) to select another IP address.
-### SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character ###
+### SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character
The error
Use the `-o` to specify an [output template](#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](#configuration).
-### How do I download a video starting with a `-` ?
+### How do I download a video starting with a `-`?
Either prepend `http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=` or separate the ID from the options with `--`:
### How do I pass cookies to youtube-dl?
-Use the `--cookies` option, for example `--cookies /path/to/cookies/file.txt`. Note that cookies file must be in Mozilla/Netscape format and the first line of 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 cookies file and convert newlines if necessary to correspond your OS, namely `CRLF` (`\r\n`) for Windows, `LF` (`\n`) for Linux and `CR` (`\r`) for Mac OS. `HTTP Error 400: Bad Request` when using `--cookies` is a good sign of invalid newline format.
+Use the `--cookies` option, for example `--cookies /path/to/cookies/file.txt`. 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, `LF` (`\n`) for Linux and `CR` (`\r`) for Mac OS. `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 particular extractor does not implement it explicitly.
+Passing cookies to youtube-dl is a good way to workaround login when a particular extractor does not implement it explicitly.
### Can you add support for this anime video site, or site which shows current movies for free?
webpage = self._download_webpage(url, video_id)
# TODO more code goes here, for example ...
- title = self._html_search_regex(r'<h1>(.*?)</h1>', webpage, 'title')
+ 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/__init__.py`](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/__init__.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 be then be named `TestDownload.test_YourExtractor`, `TestDownload.test_YourExtractor_1`, `TestDownload.test_YourExtractor_2`, etc.
+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.
7. Have a look at [`youtube_dl/extractor/common.py`](https://github.com/rg3/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/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L62-L200). Add tests and code for as many as you want.
8. If you can, check the code with [flake8](https://pypi.python.org/pypi/flake8).
9. When the tests pass, [add](http://git-scm.com/docs/git-add) the new files and [commit](http://git-scm.com/docs/git-commit) them and [push](http://git-scm.com/docs/git-push) the result, like this:
ydl.download(['http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKc'])
```
-Most likely, you'll want to use various options. For a list of what can be done, have a look at [youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py#L117-L265). For a start, if you want to intercept youtube-dl's output, set a `logger` object.
+Most likely, you'll want to use various options. For a list of what can be done, have a look at [`youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py`](https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/YoutubeDL.py#L121-L269). 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:
# BUGS
-Bugs and suggestions should be reported at: <https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues> . Unless you were prompted so 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 on freenode.
+Bugs and suggestions should be reported at: <https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues>. Unless you were prompted so 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](http://webchat.freenode.net/?randomnick=1&channels=youtube-dl)).
-**Please include the full output of youtube-dl when run with `-v`**.
+**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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj
+[debug] System config: []
+[debug] User config: []
+[debug] Command-line args: [u'-v', u'http://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 log only plain text is acceptable.**
-The output (including the first lines) contain important debugging information. Issues without the full output are often not reproducible and therefore do not get solved in short order, if ever.
+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):
- 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 commiter 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.
+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 http://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. http://www.youtube.com/ ) is *not* an example URL.
+**Site support requests must contain an example URL**. An example URL is a URL you might want to download, like `http://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. `http://www.youtube.com/`) is *not* an example URL.
### Are you using the latest version?
### 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 at https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/search?type=Issues . 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.
+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/rg3/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?
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.
+This README file was originally written by [Daniel Bolton](https://github.com/dbbolton) and is likewise released into the public domain.
projects / youtube-dl / blobdiff