Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

1y ago

What is your preferred way of downloading youtube videos?

I'm looking to download a number of educational youtube videos for future reference. Looking for a reliable way to download videos. OS is Ubuntu. FF extensions and docker containers all good. I don't really want to install an executable on bare metal unless it is a flatpak.

My goal is for the downloaded videos to be accessed locally via jellyfin. Jellyfin is already sorted.

Thanks in advance for your recommendations!

48 comments

I always use yt-dlp do download youtube videos. It doesn't require installation, you just download and run it.
- I was just looking at this. Do you typically run it behind a VPN or do you expose your actual IP?
  
  I've never used a VPN with it.
  
  I use it all the time without any VPN and haven't had any issues. I watch almost all youtube videos in MPV, which uses yt-dlp to get the video. I download any video I may want to watch again later to my server.
  
  No need of VPN. But it wouldn't harm if you wanted to have more privacy
  
  It shouldn't be needed but if you want extra privacy, you can try torsocks.
  
  I never used a VPN with it. I've been using it for years. I figured I'm getting it directly for YouTube. Google already knows my IP. I figured they wouldn't care unless I abuse it anyway.

yt-dlp, full hd quality, best audio, reading from a txt file for every URL

+1 for yt-dlp
jdownloader2 also works for this

yt-dlp with a couple scripts I wrote, depending on the usecase.

For channels I want to preserve, Tube Archivist. For individual videos, yt-dlp.

You should listen to all the yt-dlp comments, but I've always had trouble getting all the yt-dl variants to just download the best version and subtitles consistently.
I use 4K Video Downloader, and it's easier to use. It has a 30 video per day limit is all, which is more than I need.
- WDYM you've had difficulty?? Isn't it just --embedded-subs or something?
  
  Maybe the command line version is consistent, but day to day I prefer not to do command line. I've tried like 5 different GUIs and they all have failed downloads, incorrect formats, and other issues just doing test downloads. I don't know why, but it's been a problem every time for me.
- the best version is always the default for me on yt-dlp, that and --embed-subs has always worked perfectly for me, weird you've had issues with it, this is the first I've heard of anyone having that problem.

If you're into selfhosting I've heard good things about tube archivist. It integrates with jellyfin
- Seconded. It downloads metadata, thumbnails, and comments too. Also has a browser extension that adds a download button into YouTube to trigger downloads on the server.

JDownloader 2 has never let me down.

Tartube, a gui frontend for yt-dlp
- +1
  Nice and easy to use too with powerful automation if you want it.

on android: ytldnis
[i only trust the github one]
- Seal is another great downloader for Android
- Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec

I just go to YouTube to MP3, or whatever it's called these days.

https://cobalt.tools/
- Cobalt is an awesome downloader, if the main instance (cobalt.tools) ever goes down or gets blocked by YouTube, there are countless other instances: https://instances.hyper.lol/instances/
  It's really a great project, make sure to promote it, give it a star on GitHub, maybe donate a few bucks (crypto addresses can be found when clicking on the donate button in the app)

TubeArchivist with a browser extension to easily download any interesting video I want to preserve.
I have pending to link TubeArchivist to jellyfin for a more convenient frontend for my videos.

Newpipe

I just add "pp" into the URL bar. Between the .com and youtube (youtubepp.com).
Idk if it's safe or whatever, I get my video, and funny haha pp joke.

https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer mobile and desktop

I use a yt-dlp frontend like clipgrap or seal

I tend to drop the link into yt1s.com
Sometimes just for audio, sometimes for the full vid.
I'm rarely grabbing more than one video at a time though.
[re-commenting as I meant this to be a top-level comment, not a reply]

yt-dlp is pretty much the standard program for it https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
It is installable as a python module, so it should be easy to sandbox if you need to (though it requires ffmpeg too). Nowadays I almost view it as a standard unix utility though and wouldn't think twice about installing the native package

parabolic

Skytube

I self-host MeTube, and have a shortcut set up for my share-screen. When I see a video I want downloaded, I hit the Share button, and press the custom script that sends the link to be downloaded onto my Emby server.

I pretty much only do it on my phone, pretty much the only place I watch videos. So I just use either Newpipe or Pipepipe, a Newpipe fork.

48 comments