Download Youtube Videos: The easy way

Once in a while I get to download Youtube videos here and there, but in most cases I am always targeting  some particular topic, and the result, as expected, is just so overwhelming (meaning, so many videos available, you don't know from where to start).

In many cases, though, you just have a bunch of small files that are not least important, but the pain to go over all of them page by page can become the reason for you not to watch them at all. Ok, if you have the time to stay in front of the computer and watch them in a batch, Youtube has features to help you on that.

In my case, however, I mostly want to check them out later, specially carrying the files on my mobile device (iPhone), so I can watch them whenever I have spare time.

So I was looking for some tools to ease my downloading pain (used to use the Easy Youtube Video Downloader, an add-on for Firefox, but it is still one-by-one kind of tool, which was still painful), I came across the youtube-dl script, which solved all my problems.

With very minimum command-line options, you are able to download all videos in specific format of any playlist, search results... really the kind of thing I was looking for!

Here is an example to download from a playlist (which I use a lot):

# from command-line (terminal)

./youtube-dl -m -o "%(title)s_%(id)s.%(ext)s" {link}

Notes:

• the original downloable file is downloaded as a simple file by default. To execute it such as above, you will need to give executable permissions to it: sudo chmod 755 youtube-dl
• the "-m" option is for "mp4" mobile formats
• the output name by default comes as an ID only, which is hard to track what was that video file about, so we can adjust its name such as my example above.
• the "link" can be either:
• a video link, such as  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5QIboyWscY
• a playlist link, such as http://www.youtube.com/user/AtGoogleTalks#p/c/B74595015191C796
• searches, etc...

See the youtube-dl main page for additional information.