Youtube Video Downloads

Introduction

Now you probably already know some internet websites that provide the service of downloading youtube content, and great they Youtube is, it does suffer from bandwidth issues especially if you are on a slow network. Not your fault perhaps but not Google's either as you pay on the basis of what you can afford. Some have additional difficulties when the content or the number of Gigabytes they use is effectively capped. With the advent of the Smart Television all content will be streamed via the internet connection service you purchased, now if your content is uncapped you wont't have much of an issue. If however you are capped then the 1 Gagbyte data download can evaporate very quickly especially if you watch the same content repeatedly. If your interest is to perhaps steal the content provided rather than 'self use' then we don't recommend or endorse the use of this method.

Installation

Youtube-dl is a command line tool and simple to download and use it has many if not all the features you can find on many of the service sites and has the advantage that it can be scripted, or rather incorporated within a batch script or cron job. To download this tool in Ubuntu (Known to work in 12.04 64 & 32) you can use any of the standard installation methods, however for the purpose of this tutorial we will use the command line as the tool itself is a command line application.

Open a new terminal session and paste the following commands


Once installed you should make sure you have the latest version you can do this within the "youtube-dl" application as below.

Youtube-dl Application

Now you can organise and prepare the application to download the content you want. Select the youtube website from your browser and direct yourself to the video you are aiming to capture. Select the video and play it just to check visually this is indeed the video you want.

We have selected the following information from the URL you may notice unusual or non alpha numeric characters at the end of the URL these are important and must be when and if used.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ooy2LTJoMVM#!

We do not need the component "feature=player_embedded&" so we will edit this portion out before we append it to the command line, we recommend you do this in an editor of some description. You should end with a URL that looks like this:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooy2LTJoMVM#!

Now copy the edited URL similar to the one above to the Ubuntu clipboard and prepare to append to the youtube-dl command to do this you will need still up your terminal session which hopefully you haven't yet closed. You don not need sudo from this point so we can use the application as is.

Be sure that you are using the correct URL otherwise the film or video will not download, now the above command will work quite adequately but will give you a ridiculous title, we can by using command line parameters improve the quality and adopt the given title by appending the command line with generic terms such as ( --max-quality=FMT) and ( -t) the former will adopt for maximum quality available as it names suggests and the later places the title name and prefixes the filename.

This will for the example above produce a filename that looks like this The\ Revelation\ of\ the\ Pyramids-ooy2LTJoMVM.mp4

Summary

We hope you have found this tutorial of use and if you would like to contribute please do get in touch or add your content after you have registered we will review your work and publish once we are satisfied our policies have been adhered to.