Document: WR-005                                                 P. Webb
                                                              2024.11.08

                        youtube-dl tips & tricks

Body

   Everyone knows youtube-dl doesn’t really work these days. What
   does work is the successor, yt-dlp[1]. I install it
   via brew[2]:

   

   brew install yt-dlp



   Here’s the contents of my ~/.config/yt-dlp/config (it automatically
   titles videos I download):

   

   --format-sort "ext"
   -o ~/Movies/%(title)s.%(ext)s



   Finally, here’s what’s in my ~/.zshrc (I use zsh[3]):

   

   alias yt="yt-dlp"

   ig() {
     yt $1 -f mp4
   }



   Downloading YouTube videos is as easy as:

   

   yt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_5zwYVh8i5w



   And Instagram videos:

   

   # this is an hour-long video and Instagram pauses playback if you dare multitask
   ig https://www.instagram.com/p/DCDRaRoxJYW/