youtube-dl - Man Page

--proxy URL

Use the specified HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS proxy. To enable SOCKS proxy, specify a proper scheme. For example socks5://127.0.0.1:1080/. Pass in an empty string (--proxy "") for direct connection

--socket-timeout SECONDS

Time to wait before giving up, in seconds

--source-address IP

Client-side IP address to bind to

-4,  --force-ipv4

Make all connections via IPv4

-6,  --force-ipv6

Make all connections via IPv6

--geo-verification-proxy URL

Use this proxy to verify the IP address for some geo-restricted sites. The default proxy specified by --proxy (or none, if the option is not present) is used for the actual downloading.

--geo-bypass

Bypass geographic restriction via faking X-Forwarded-For HTTP header

--no-geo-bypass

Do not bypass geographic restriction via faking X-Forwarded-For HTTP header

--geo-bypass-country CODE

Force bypass geographic restriction with explicitly provided two-letter ISO 3166-2 country code

--geo-bypass-ip-block IP_BLOCK

Force bypass geographic restriction with explicitly provided IP block in CIDR notation

--playlist-start NUMBER

Playlist video to start at (default is 1)

--playlist-end NUMBER

Playlist video to end at (default is last)

--playlist-items ITEM_SPEC

Playlist video items to download. Specify indices of the videos in the playlist separated by commas like: "-- playlist-items 1,2,5,8" if you want to download videos indexed 1, 2, 5, 8 in the playlist. You can specify range: " --playlist-items 1-3,7,10-13", it will download the videos at index 1, 2, 3, 7, 10, 11, 12 and 13.

--match-title REGEX

Download only matching titles (case- insensitive regex or alphanumeric sub- string)

--reject-title REGEX

Skip download for matching titles (case-insensitive regex or alphanumeric sub-string)

--max-downloads NUMBER

Abort after downloading NUMBER files

--min-filesize SIZE

Do not download any videos smaller than SIZE (e.g. 50k or 44.6m)

--max-filesize SIZE

Do not download any videos larger than SIZE (e.g. 50k or 44.6m)

--date DATE

Download only videos uploaded in this date

--datebefore DATE

Download only videos uploaded on or before this date (i.e. inclusive)

--dateafter DATE

Download only videos uploaded on or after this date (i.e. inclusive)

--min-views COUNT

Do not download any videos with less than COUNT views

--max-views COUNT

Do not download any videos with more than COUNT views

--match-filter FILTER

Generic video filter. Specify any key (see the "Output Template" for a list of available keys) to match if the key is present, !key to check if the key is not present, key > NUMBER (like "comment_count > 12", also works with >=, <, <=, !=, =) to compare against a number, key = 'LITERAL' (like "uploader = 'Mike Smith'", also works with !=) to match against a string literal and & to require multiple matches. Values which are not known are excluded unless you put a question mark (?) after the operator. For example, to only match videos that have been liked more than 100 times and disliked less than 50 times (or the dislike functionality is not available at the given service), but who also have a description, use --match-filter "like_count > 100 & dislike_count <? 50 & description" .

--no-playlist

Download only the video, if the URL refers to a video and a playlist.

--yes-playlist

Download the playlist, if the URL refers to a video and a playlist.

--age-limit YEARS

Download only videos suitable for the given age

--download-archive FILE

Download only videos not listed in the archive file. Record the IDs of all downloaded videos in it.

--include-ads

Download advertisements as well (experimental)

-r,  --limit-rate RATE

Maximum download rate in bytes per second (e.g. 50K or 4.2M)

-R,  --retries RETRIES

Number of retries (default is 10), or "infinite".

--fragment-retries RETRIES

Number of retries for a fragment (default is 10), or "infinite" (DASH, hlsnative and ISM)

--skip-unavailable-fragments

Skip unavailable fragments (DASH, hlsnative and ISM)

--abort-on-unavailable-fragment

Abort downloading when some fragment is not available

--keep-fragments

Keep downloaded fragments on disk after downloading is finished; fragments are erased by default

--buffer-size SIZE

Size of download buffer (e.g. 1024 or 16K) (default is 1024)

--no-resize-buffer

Do not automatically adjust the buffer size. By default, the buffer size is automatically resized from an initial value of SIZE.

--http-chunk-size SIZE

Size of a chunk for chunk-based HTTP downloading (e.g. 10485760 or 10M) (default is disabled). May be useful for bypassing bandwidth throttling imposed by a webserver (experimental)

--playlist-reverse

Download playlist videos in reverse order

--playlist-random

Download playlist videos in random order

--xattr-set-filesize

Set file xattribute ytdl.filesize with expected file size

--hls-prefer-native

Use the native HLS downloader instead of ffmpeg

--hls-prefer-ffmpeg

Use ffmpeg instead of the native HLS downloader

--hls-use-mpegts

Use the mpegts container for HLS videos, allowing to play the video while downloading (some players may not be able to play it)

--external-downloader COMMAND

Use the specified external downloader. Currently supports aria2c,aria2p,avconv ,axel,curl,ffmpeg,httpie,wget

--external-downloader-args ARGS

Give these arguments to the external downloader

-a,  --batch-file FILE

File containing URLs to download ('-' for stdin), one URL per line. Lines starting with '#', ';' or ']' are considered as comments and ignored.

--id

Use only video ID in file name

-o,  --output TEMPLATE

Output filename template, see the "Output Template" for all the info

--output-na-placeholder PLACEHOLDER

Placeholder value for unavailable meta fields in output filename template (default is "NA")

--autonumber-start NUMBER

Specify the start value for %(autonumber)s (default is 1)

--restrict-filenames

Restrict filenames to only ASCII characters, and avoid "&" and spaces in filenames

-w,  --no-overwrites

Do not overwrite files

-c,  --continue

Force resume of partially downloaded files. By default, youtube-dl will resume downloads if possible.

--no-continue

Do not resume partially downloaded files (restart from beginning)

--no-part

Do not use .part files - write directly into output file

--mtime

Use the Last-modified header to set the file modification time (default)

--no-mtime

Do not use the Last-modified header to set the file modification time

--write-description

Write video description to a .description file

--write-info-json

Write video metadata to a .info.json file

--write-annotations

Write video annotations to a .annotations.xml file

--load-info-json FILE

JSON file containing the video information (created with the "--write- info-json" option)

--cookies FILE

File to read cookies from and dump cookie jar in

--cache-dir DIR

Location in the filesystem where youtube-dl can store some downloaded information permanently. By default $XDG_CACHE_HOME/youtube-dl or ~/.cache/youtube-dl . At the moment, only YouTube player files (for videos with obfuscated signatures) are cached, but that may change.

--no-cache-dir

Disable filesystem caching

--rm-cache-dir

Delete all filesystem cache files

--write-thumbnail

Write thumbnail image to disk

--write-all-thumbnails

Write all thumbnail image formats to disk

--list-thumbnails

Simulate and list all available thumbnail formats

-q,  --quiet

Activate quiet mode

--no-warnings

Ignore warnings

-s,  --simulate

Do not download the video and do not write anything to disk

--skip-download

Do not download the video

-g,  --get-url

Simulate, quiet but print URL

-e,  --get-title

Simulate, quiet but print title

--get-id

Simulate, quiet but print id

--get-thumbnail

Simulate, quiet but print thumbnail URL

--get-description

Simulate, quiet but print video description

--get-duration

Simulate, quiet but print video length

--get-filename

Simulate, quiet but print output filename

--get-format

Simulate, quiet but print output format

-j,  --dump-json

Simulate, quiet but print JSON information. See the "Output Template" for a description of available keys.

-J,  --dump-single-json

Simulate, quiet but print JSON information for each command-line argument. If the URL refers to a playlist, dump the whole playlist information in a single line.

--print-json

Be quiet and print the video information as JSON (video is still being downloaded).

--newline

Output progress bar as new lines

--no-progress

Do not print progress bar

--console-title

Display progress in console titlebar

-v,  --verbose

Print various debugging information

--dump-pages

Print downloaded pages encoded using base64 to debug problems (very verbose)

--write-pages

Write downloaded intermediary pages to files in the current directory to debug problems

--print-traffic

Display sent and read HTTP traffic

-C,  --call-home

Contact the youtube-dl server for debugging

--no-call-home

Do NOT contact the youtube-dl server for debugging

--encoding ENCODING

Force the specified encoding (experimental)

--no-check-certificate

Suppress HTTPS certificate validation

--no-check-extensions

Suppress file extension validation

--prefer-insecure

Use an unencrypted connection to retrieve information about the video. (Currently supported only for YouTube)

--user-agent UA

Specify a custom user agent

--referer URL

Specify a custom Referer: use if the video access is restricted to one domain

--add-header FIELD:VALUE

Specify a custom HTTP header and its value, separated by a colon ':'. You can use this option multiple times. NB Use --cookies rather than adding a Cookie header if its contents may be sensitive; data from a Cookie header will be sent to all domains, not just the one intended

--bidi-workaround

Work around terminals that lack bidirectional text support. Requires bidiv or fribidi executable in PATH

--sleep-interval SECONDS

Number of seconds to sleep before each download when used alone or a lower bound of a range for randomized sleep before each download (minimum possible number of seconds to sleep) when used along with --max-sleep-interval.

--max-sleep-interval SECONDS

Upper bound of a range for randomized sleep before each download (maximum possible number of seconds to sleep). Must only be used along with --min- sleep-interval.

-f,  --format FORMAT

Video format code, see the "Format Selection" for all the info

--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 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. bestvideo+bestaudio), output to given container format. One of mkv, mp4, ogg, webm, flv. Ignored if no merge is required

--write-sub

Write subtitle file

--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

--sub-format FORMAT

Subtitle format, accepts formats preference, for example: "srt" or "ass/srt/best"

--sub-lang LANGS

Languages of the subtitles to download (optional) separated by commas, use --list-subs for available language tags

-u,  --username USERNAME

Login with this account ID

-p,  --password PASSWORD

Account password. If this option is left out, youtube-dl will ask interactively.

-2,  --twofactor TWOFACTOR

Two-factor authentication code

-n,  --netrc

Use .netrc authentication data

--video-password PASSWORD

Video password (vimeo, youku)

--ap-mso MSO

Adobe Pass multiple-system operator (TV provider) identifier, use --ap-list-mso for a list of available MSOs

--ap-username USERNAME

Multiple-system operator account login

--ap-password PASSWORD

Multiple-system operator account password. If this option is left out, youtube-dl will ask interactively.

--ap-list-mso

List all supported multiple-system operators

-x,  --extract-audio

Convert video files to audio-only files (requires ffmpeg/avconv and ffprobe/avprobe)

--audio-format FORMAT

Specify audio format: "best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", "vorbis", or "wav"; "best" by default; No effect without -x

--audio-quality QUALITY

Specify ffmpeg/avconv audio quality, insert a value between 0 (better) and 9 (worse) for VBR or a specific bitrate like 128K (default 5)

--recode-video FORMAT

Encode the video to another format if necessary (currently supported: mp4|flv|ogg|webm|mkv|avi)

--postprocessor-args ARGS

Give these arguments to the postprocessor (if postprocessing is required)

-k,  --keep-video

Keep the video file on disk after the post-processing; the video is erased by default

--no-post-overwrites

Do not overwrite post-processed files; the post-processed files are overwritten by default

--embed-subs

Embed subtitles in the video (only for mp4, webm and mkv videos)

--embed-thumbnail

Embed thumbnail in the audio as cover art

--add-metadata

Write metadata to the video file

--metadata-from-title FORMAT

Parse additional metadata like song title / artist from the video title. The format syntax is the same as --output. Regular expression with named capture groups may also be used. The parsed parameters replace existing values. Example: --metadata-from-title "%(artist)s - %(title)s" matches a title like "Coldplay - Paradise". Example (regex): --metadata-from-title "(?P.+?) - (?P
.+)"

--xattrs

Write metadata to the video file's xattrs (using dublin core and xdg standards)

--fixup POLICY

Automatically correct known faults of the file. One of never (do nothing), warn (only emit a warning), detect_or_warn (the default; fix file if we can, warn otherwise)

--prefer-avconv

Prefer avconv over ffmpeg for running the postprocessors

--prefer-ffmpeg

Prefer ffmpeg over avconv for running the postprocessors (default)

--ffmpeg-location PATH

Location of the ffmpeg/avconv binary; either the path to the binary or its containing directory.

--exec CMD

Execute a command on the file after downloading and post-processing, similar to find's -exec syntax. Example: --exec 'adb push {} /sdcard/Music/ && rm {}'

--convert-subs FORMAT

Convert the subtitles to other format (currently supported: srt|ass|vtt|lrc)

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\c  on a per extractor basis. For that you will need to create a .netrc file in your $HOME and restrict permissions to read/write by only you:

touch $HOME/.netrc
chmod a-rwx,u+rw $HOME/.netrc

After that you can add credentials for an extractor in the following format, where extractor is the name of the extractor in lowercase:

machine <extractor> login <login> password <password>

For example:

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 the .netrc file you should pass --netrc to youtube-dl or place it in the configuration file.

On Windows you may also need to setup the %HOME% environment variable manually. For example:

set HOME=%USERPROFILE%

If you are using an output template inside a Windows batch file then you must escape plain percent characters (%) by doubling, so that -o "%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" should become -o "%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s". However you should not touch %'s that are not plain characters, e.g. environment variables for expansion should stay intact: -o "C:\%HOMEPATH%\Desktop\%%(title)s.%%(ext)s".

Note that on Windows you may need to use double quotes instead of single.

$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' BaW_jenozKc
youtube-dl test video ''_ä↭𝕐.mp4    # All kinds of weird characters

$ youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' BaW_jenozKc --restrict-filenames
youtube-dl_test_video_.mp4          # A simple file name

# Download YouTube playlist videos in separate directory indexed by video order in a playlist
$ youtube-dl -o '%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re

# Download all playlists of YouTube channel/user keeping each playlist in separate directory:
$ youtube-dl -o '%(uploader)s/%(playlist)s/%(playlist_index)s - %(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.youtube.com/user/TheLinuxFoundation/playlists

# Download Udemy course keeping each chapter in separate directory under MyVideos directory in your home
$ youtube-dl -u user -p password -o '~/MyVideos/%(playlist)s/%(chapter_number)s - %(chapter)s/%(title)s.%(ext)s' https://www.udemy.com/java-tutorial/

# Download entire series season keeping each series and each season in separate directory under C:/MyVideos
$ youtube-dl -o "C:/MyVideos/%(series)s/%(season_number)s - %(season)s/%(episode_number)s - %(episode)s.%(ext)s" https://videomore.ru/kino_v_detalayah/5_sezon/367617

# Stream the video being downloaded to stdout
$ youtube-dl -o - BaW_jenozKc

Note that on Windows you may need to use double quotes instead of single.

# Download best mp4 format available or any other best if no mp4 available
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best'

# Download best format available but no better than 480p
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[height<=480]+bestaudio/best[height<=480]'

# Download best video only format but no bigger than 50 MB
$ youtube-dl -f 'best[filesize<50M]'

# Download best format available via direct link over HTTP/HTTPS protocol
$ youtube-dl -f '(bestvideo+bestaudio/best)[protocol^=http]'

# Download the best video format and the best audio format without merging them
$ youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo,bestaudio' -o '%(title)s.f%(format_id)s.%(ext)s'

Note that in the last example, an output template is recommended as bestvideo and bestaudio may have the same file name.

If you've followed our manual installation instructions\c , you can simply run youtube-dl -U (or, on Linux, sudo youtube-dl -U).

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 https://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

sudo apt-get remove -y youtube-dl

Afterwards, simply follow our manual installation instructions\c :

sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
hash -r

Again, from then on you'll be able to update with sudo youtube-dl -U.

Add a file exclusion for youtube-dl.exe in Windows Defender settings.

YouTube changed their playlist format in March 2014 and later on, so you'll need at least youtube-dl 2014.07.25 to download all YouTube videos.

If you have installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball, please use that to update. Note that Ubuntu packages do not seem to get updated anymore. Since we are not affiliated with Ubuntu, there is little we can do. Feel free to report bugs\c  to the ubuntu-motu@lists.ubuntu.com?subject=outdated%20version%20of%20youtube-dl Ubuntu packaging people\c  - all they have to do is update the package to a somewhat recent version. See above for a way to update.

Make sure you are not using -o with any of these options -t, --title, --id, -A or --auto-number set in command line or in a configuration file. Remove the latter if any.

By default, youtube-dl intends to have the best options (incidentally, if you have a convincing case that these should be different, please file an issue where you explain that\c ). Therefore, it is unnecessary and sometimes harmful to copy long option strings from webpages. In particular, the only option out of -citw that is regularly useful is -i.

Most people asking this question are not aware that youtube-dl now defaults to downloading the highest available quality as reported by YouTube, which will be 1080p or 720p in some cases, so you no longer need the -b option. For some specific videos, maybe YouTube does not report them to be available in a specific high quality format you're interested in. In that case, simply request it with the -f option and youtube-dl will try to download it.

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\c , but at the moment, your best course of action is pointing a web browser to the youtube URL, solving the CAPTCHA, and restart youtube-dl.

youtube-dl works fine on its own on most sites. However, if you want to convert video/audio, you'll need avconv\c  or ffmpeg\c . 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\c  is installed. Downloading MMS and RTSP videos requires either mplayer\c  or mpv\c  to be installed.

Once the video is fully downloaded, use any video player, such as mpv\c , vlc\c  or mplayer\c .

It depends a lot on the service. In many cases, requests for the video (to download/play it) must come from the same IP address and with the same cookies and/or HTTP headers. Use the --cookies option to write the required cookies into a file, and advise your downloader to read cookies from that file. Some sites also require a common user agent to be used, use --dump-user-agent to see the one in use by youtube-dl. You can also get necessary cookies and HTTP headers from JSON output obtained with --dump-json.

It may be beneficial to use IPv6; in some cases, the restrictions are only applied to IPv4. Some services (sometimes only for a subset of videos) do not restrict the video URL by IP address, cookie, or user-agent, but these are the exception rather than the rule.

Please bear in mind that some URL protocols are not supported by browsers out of the box, including RTMP. If you are using -g, your own downloader must support these as well.

If you want to play the video on a machine that is not running youtube-dl, you can relay the video content from the machine that runs youtube-dl. You can use -o - to let youtube-dl stream a video to stdout, or simply allow the player to download the files written by youtube-dl in turn.

YouTube has switched to a new video info format in July 2011 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl.

YouTube requires an additional signature since September 2012 which is not supported by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl.

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:

youtube-dl 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc'

or

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4\&v=BaW_jenozKc

For Windows you have to use the double quotes:

youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=4&v=BaW_jenozKc"

In February 2015, the new YouTube player contained a character sequence in a string that was misinterpreted by old versions of youtube-dl. See above for how to update youtube-dl.

These two error codes indicate that the service is blocking your IP address because of overuse. Usually this is a soft block meaning that you can gain access again after solving CAPTCHA. Just open a browser and solve a CAPTCHA the service suggests you and after that pass cookies to youtube-dl. Note that if your machine has multiple external IPs then you should also pass exactly the same IP you've used for solving CAPTCHA with --source-address. Also you may need to pass a User-Agent HTTP header of your browser with --user-agent.

If this is not the case (no CAPTCHA suggested to solve by the service) then you can 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 to select another IP address.

The error

File "youtube-dl", line 2
SyntaxError: Non-ASCII character '\x93' ...

means you're using an outdated version of Python. Please update to Python 2.6 or 2.7.

Since June 2012 (#342\c ) youtube-dl is packed as an executable zipfile, simply unzip it (might need renaming to youtube-dl.zip first on some systems) or clone the git repository, as laid out above. If you modify the code, you can run it by executing the __main__.py file. To recompile the executable, run make youtube-dl.

To run the exe you need to install first the https://download.microsoft.com/download/1/6/5/165255E7-1014-4D0A-B094-B6A430A6BFFC/vcredist_x86.exe Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Service Pack 1 Redistributable Package (x86)\c .

If you put youtube-dl and ffmpeg in the same directory that you're running the command from, it will work, but that's rather cumbersome.

To make a different directory work - either for ffmpeg, or for youtube-dl, or for both - simply create the directory (say, C:\bin, or C:\Users\<User name>\bin), put all the executables directly in there, and then set your PATH environment variable\c  to include that directory.

From then on, after restarting your shell, you will be able to access both youtube-dl and ffmpeg (and youtube-dl will be able to find ffmpeg) by simply typing youtube-dl or ffmpeg, no matter what directory you're in.

Use the -o to specify an 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.

Either prepend https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= or separate the ID from the options with --:

youtube-dl -- -wNyEUrxzFU
youtube-dl "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wNyEUrxzFU"

Use the --cookies option, for example --cookies /path/to/cookies/file.txt.

In order to extract cookies from browser use any conforming browser extension for exporting cookies. For example, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt-locally/cclelndahbckbenkjhflpdbgdldlbecc Get cookies.txt LOCALLY\c  (for Chrome) or cookies.txt\c  (for Firefox).

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\c  in the cookies file and convert newlines if necessary to correspond with your OS, namely CRLF (\r\n) for Windows and LF (\n) for Unix and Unix-like systems (Linux, macOS, etc.). 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 a particular extractor does not implement it explicitly. Another use case is working around CAPTCHA\c  some websites require you to solve in particular cases in order to get access (e.g. YouTube, CloudFlare).

You will first need to tell youtube-dl to stream media to stdout with -o -, and also tell your media player to read from stdin (it must be capable of this for streaming) and then pipe former to latter. For example, streaming to vlc\c  can be achieved with:

youtube-dl -o - "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaW_jenozKcj" | vlc -

Use download-archive feature. With this feature you should initially download the complete playlist with --download-archive /path/to/download/archive/file.txt that will record identifiers of all the videos in a special file. Each subsequent run with the same --download-archive will download only new videos and skip all videos that have been downloaded before. Note that only successful downloads are recorded in the file.

For example, at first,

youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

will download the complete PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re playlist and create a file archive.txt. Each subsequent run will only download new videos if any:

youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwiyx1dc3P2JR9N8gQaQN_BCvlSlap7re"

When youtube-dl detects an HLS video, it can download it either with the built-in downloader or ffmpeg. Since many HLS streams are slightly invalid and ffmpeg/youtube-dl each handle some invalid cases better than the other, there is an option to switch the downloader if needed.

When youtube-dl knows that one particular downloader works better for a given website, that downloader will be picked. Otherwise, youtube-dl will pick the best downloader for general compatibility, which at the moment happens to be ffmpeg. This choice may change in future versions of youtube-dl, with improvements of the built-in downloader and/or ffmpeg.

In particular, the generic extractor (used when your website is not in the list of supported sites by youtube-dl\c  cannot mandate one specific downloader.

If you put either --hls-prefer-native or --hls-prefer-ffmpeg into your configuration, a different subset of videos will fail to download correctly. Instead, it is much better to file an issue\c  or a pull request which details why the native or the ffmpeg HLS downloader is a better choice for your use case.

As a matter of policy (as well as legality), youtube-dl does not include support for services that specialize in infringing copyright. As a rule of thumb, if you cannot easily find a video that the service is quite obviously allowed to distribute (i.e. that has been uploaded by the creator, the creator's distributor, or is published under a free license), the service is probably unfit for inclusion to youtube-dl.

A note on the service that they don't host the infringing content, but just link to those who do, is evidence that the service should not be included into youtube-dl. The same goes for any DMCA note when the whole front page of the service is filled with videos they are not allowed to distribute. A "fair use" note is equally unconvincing if the service shows copyright-protected videos in full without authorization.

Support requests for services that do purchase the rights to distribute their content are perfectly fine though. If in doubt, you can simply include a source that mentions the legitimate purchase of content.

(Also known as: Help, my important issue not being solved!) The youtube-dl core developer team is quite small. While we do our best to solve as many issues as possible, sometimes that can take quite a while. To speed up your issue, here's what you can do:

First of all, please do report the issue at our issue tracker\c . That allows us to coordinate all efforts by users and developers, and serves as a unified point. Unfortunately, the youtube-dl project has grown too large to use personal email as an effective communication channel.

Please read the bug reporting instructions below. A lot of bugs lack all the necessary information. If you can, offer proxy, VPN, or shell access to the youtube-dl developers. If you are able to, test the issue from multiple computers in multiple countries to exclude local censorship or misconfiguration issues.

If nobody is interested in solving your issue, you are welcome to take matters into your own hands and submit a pull request (or coerce/pay somebody else to do so).

Feel free to bump the issue from time to time by writing a small comment ("Issue is still present in youtube-dl version ...from France, but fixed from Belgium"), but please not more than once a month. Please do not declare your issue as important or urgent.

For one, have a look at the list of supported sites. Note that it can sometimes happen that the site changes its URL scheme (say, from https://example.com/video/1234567 to https://example.com/v/1234567 ) and youtube-dl reports an URL of a service in that list as unsupported. In that case, simply report a bug.

It is not possible to detect whether a URL is supported or not. That's because youtube-dl contains a generic extractor which matches all URLs. You may be tempted to disable, exclude, or remove the generic extractor, but the generic extractor not only allows users to extract videos from lots of websites that embed a video from another service, but may also be used to extract video from a service that it's hosting itself. Therefore, we neither recommend nor support disabling, excluding, or removing the generic extractor.

If you want to find out whether a given URL is supported, simply call youtube-dl with it. If you get no videos back, chances are the URL is either not referring to a video or unsupported. You can find out which by examining the output (if you run youtube-dl on the console) or catching an UnsupportedError exception if you run it from a Python program.

If you want to add support for a new site, first of all make sure this site is not dedicated to copyright infringement. youtube-dl does not support such sites thus pull requests adding support for them will be rejected.

After you have ensured this site is distributing its content legally, you can follow this quick list (assuming your service is called yourextractor):

1. Fork this repository\c

2. Check out the source code with:

    git clone git@github.com:YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME/youtube-dl.git

3. Start a new git branch with

    cd youtube-dl
    git checkout -b yourextractor

4. Start with this simple template and save it to youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py:

   # coding: utf-8
   from __future__ import unicode_literals
   
   from .common import InfoExtractor
   
   
   class YourExtractorIE(InfoExtractor):
       _VALID_URL = r'https?://(?:www\.)?yourextractor\.com/watch/(?P<id>[0-9]+)'
       _TEST = {
           'url': 'https://yourextractor.com/watch/42',
           'md5': 'TODO: md5 sum of the first 10241 bytes of the video file (use --test)',
           'info_dict': {
               'id': '42',
               'ext': 'mp4',
               'title': 'Video title goes here',
               'thumbnail': r're:^https?://.*\.jpg$',
               # TODO more properties, either as:
               # * A value
               # * MD5 checksum; start the string with md5:
               # * A regular expression; start the string with re:
               # * Any Python type (for example int or float)
           }
       }
   
       def _real_extract(self, url):
           video_id = self._match_id(url)
           webpage = self._download_webpage(url, video_id)
   
           # TODO more code goes here, for example ...
           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 https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py\c .

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 (actually, test case) 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. Note:

   • the test names use the extractor class name without the trailing IE
   • tests with only_matching key in test's dict are not counted.
7. Have a look at https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py youtube_dl/extractor/common.py\c  for possible helper methods and a https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/7f41a598b3fba1bcab2817de64a08941200aa3c8/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L94-L303 detailed description of what your extractor should and may return\c . Add tests and code for as many as you want.

8. Make sure your code follows youtube-dl coding conventions and check the code with flake8\c :

    $ flake8 youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py

9. Make sure your code works under all Python\c  versions claimed supported by youtube-dl, namely 2.6, 2.7, and 3.2+.

10. When the tests pass, add\c  the new files and commit\c  them and push\c  the result, like this:

    $ git add youtube_dl/extractor/extractors.py
    $ git add youtube_dl/extractor/yourextractor.py
    $ git commit -m '[yourextractor] Add new extractor'
    $ git push origin yourextractor

11. Finally, create a pull request\c . We'll then review and merge it.

In any case, thank you very much for your contributions!

This section introduces guidelines for writing idiomatic, robust and future-proof extractor code.

Extractors are very fragile by nature since they depend on the layout of the source data provided by 3rd party media hosters out of your control and this layout tends to change. As an extractor implementer your task is not only to write code that will extract media links and metadata correctly but also to minimize dependency on the source's layout and even to make the code foresee potential future changes and be ready for that. This is important because it will allow the extractor not to break on minor layout changes thus keeping old youtube-dl versions working. Even though this breakage issue is easily fixed by emitting a new version of youtube-dl with a fix incorporated, all the previous versions become broken in all repositories and distros' packages that may not be so prompt in fetching the update from us. Needless to say, some non rolling release distros may never receive an update at all.

For extraction to work youtube-dl relies on metadata your extractor extracts and provides to youtube-dl expressed by an https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/7f41a598b3fba1bcab2817de64a08941200aa3c8/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L94-L303 information dictionary\c  or simply info dict. Only the following meta fields in the info dict are considered mandatory for a successful extraction process by youtube-dl:

• id (media identifier)
• title (media title)
• url (media download URL) or formats

In fact only the last option is technically mandatory (i.e. if you can't figure out the download location of the media the extraction does not make any sense). But by convention youtube-dl also treats id and title as mandatory. Thus the aforementioned metafields are the critical data that the extraction does not make any sense without and if any of them fail to be extracted then the extractor is considered completely broken.

https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/7f41a598b3fba1bcab2817de64a08941200aa3c8/youtube_dl/extractor/common.py#L188-L303 Any field\c  apart from the aforementioned ones are considered optional. That means that extraction should be tolerant to situations when sources for these fields can potentially be unavailable (even if they are always available at the moment) and future-proof in order not to break the extraction of general purpose mandatory fields.

Say you have some source dictionary meta that you've fetched as JSON with HTTP request and it has a key summary:

meta = self._download_json(url, video_id)

Assume at this point meta's layout is:

{
    ...
    "summary": "some fancy summary text",
    ...
}

Assume you want to extract summary and put it into the resulting info dict as description. Since description is an optional meta field you should be ready that this key may be missing from the meta dict, so that you should extract it like:

description = meta.get('summary')  # correct

and not like:

description = meta['summary']  # incorrect

The latter will break extraction process with KeyError if summary disappears from meta at some later time but with the former approach extraction will just go ahead with description set to None which is perfectly fine (remember None is equivalent to the absence of data).

Similarly, you should pass fatal=False when extracting optional data from a webpage with _search_regex, _html_search_regex or similar methods, for instance:

description = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+id="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)<',
    webpage, 'description', fatal=False)

With fatal set to False if _search_regex fails to extract description it will emit a warning and continue extraction.

You can also pass default=<some fallback value>, for example:

description = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+id="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)<',
    webpage, 'description', default=None)

On failure this code will silently continue the extraction with description set to None. That is useful for metafields that may or may not be present.

When extracting metadata try to do so from multiple sources. For example if title is present in several places, try extracting from at least some of them. This makes it more future-proof in case some of the sources become unavailable.

Say meta from the previous example has a title and you are about to extract it. Since title is a mandatory meta field you should end up with something like:

title = meta['title']

If title disappears from meta in future due to some changes on the hoster's side the extraction would fail since title is mandatory. That's expected.

Assume that you have some another source you can extract title from, for example og:title HTML meta of a webpage. In this case you can provide a fallback scenario:

title = meta.get('title') or self._og_search_title(webpage)

This code will try to extract from meta first and if it fails it will try extracting og:title from a webpage.

Capturing group must be an indication that it's used somewhere in the code. Any group that is not used must be non capturing.

Don't capture id attribute name here since you can't use it for anything anyway.

Correct:

r'(?:id|ID)=(?P<id>\d+)'

Incorrect:

r'(id|ID)=(?P<id>\d+)'

When using regular expressions try to write them fuzzy, relaxed and flexible, skipping insignificant parts that are more likely to change, allowing both single and double quotes for quoted values and so on.

Say you need to extract title from the following HTML code:

<span style="position: absolute; left: 910px; width: 90px; float: right; z-index: 9999;" class="title">some fancy title</span>

The code for that task should look similar to:

title = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+class="title"[^>]*>([^<]+)', webpage, 'title')

Or even better:

title = self._search_regex(
    r'<span[^>]+class=(["\'])title\1[^>]*>(?P<title>[^<]+)',
    webpage, 'title', group='title')

Note how you tolerate potential changes in the style attribute's value or switch from using double quotes to single for class attribute:

The code definitely should not look like:

title = self._search_regex(
    r'<span style="position: absolute; left: 910px; width: 90px; float: right; z-index: 9999;" class="title">(.*?)</span>',
    webpage, 'title', group='title')

There is a soft limit to keep lines of code under 80 characters long. This means it should be respected if possible and if it does not make readability and code maintenance worse.

For example, you should never split long string literals like URLs or some other often copied entities over multiple lines to fit this limit:

Correct:

'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZTN594JQw&list=PLMYEtVRpaqY00V9W81Cwmzp6N6vZqfUKD4'

Incorrect:

'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FqZTN594JQw&list='
'PLMYEtVRpaqY00V9W81Cwmzp6N6vZqfUKD4'

Extracting variables is acceptable for reducing code duplication and improving readability of complex expressions. However, you should avoid extracting variables used only once and moving them to opposite parts of the extractor file, which makes reading the linear flow difficult.

Correct:

title = self._html_search_regex(r'<title>([^<]+)</title>', webpage, 'title')

Incorrect:

TITLE_RE = r'<title>([^<]+)</title>'
# ...some lines of code...
title = self._html_search_regex(TITLE_RE, webpage, 'title')

Multiple fallback values can quickly become unwieldy. Collapse multiple fallback values into a single expression via a list of patterns.

Good:

description = self._html_search_meta(
    ['og:description', 'description', 'twitter:description'],
    webpage, 'description', default=None)

Unwieldy:

description = (
    self._og_search_description(webpage, default=None)
    or self._html_search_meta('description', webpage, default=None)
    or self._html_search_meta('twitter:description', webpage, default=None))

Methods supporting list of patterns are: _search_regex, _html_search_regex, _og_search_property, _html_search_meta.

Always move trailing parentheses after the last argument.

Correct:

    lambda x: x['ResultSet']['Result'][0]['VideoUrlSet']['VideoUrl'],
    list)

Incorrect:

    lambda x: x['ResultSet']['Result'][0]['VideoUrlSet']['VideoUrl'],
    list,
)

Wrap all extracted numeric data into safe functions from https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/utils.py youtube_dl/utils.py\c : int_or_none, float_or_none. Use them for string to number conversions as well.

Use url_or_none for safe URL processing.

Use traverse_obj for safe metadata extraction from parsed JSON.

Use unified_strdate for uniform upload_date or any YYYYMMDD meta field extraction, unified_timestamp for uniform timestamp extraction, parse_filesize for filesize extraction, parse_count for count meta fields extraction, parse_resolution, parse_duration for duration extraction, parse_age_limit for age_limit extraction.

Explore https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/master/youtube_dl/utils.py youtube_dl/utils.py\c  for more useful convenience functions.

When processing complex JSON, as often returned by site API requests or stashed in web pages for "hydration", you can use the traverse_obj() utility function to handle multiple fallback values and to ensure the expected type of metadata items. The function's docstring defines how the function works: also review usage in the codebase for more examples.

In this example, a text description, or None, is pulled from the .result.video[0].summary member of the parsed JSON response, if available.

description = traverse_obj(response, ('result', 'video', 0, 'summary', T(compat_str)))

T(...) is a shorthand for a set literal; if you hate people who still run Python 2.6, T(type_or_transformation) could be written as a set literal {type_or_transformation}.

Some extractors use the older and less capable try_get() function in the same way.

description = try_get(response, lambda x: x['result']['video'][0]['summary'], compat_str)

In this example, various optional metadata values are extracted from the .result.video[0] member of the parsed JSON response, which is expected to be a JS object, parsed into a dict, with no crash if that isn't so, or if any of the target values are missing or invalid.

video = traverse_obj(response, ('result', 'video', 0, T(dict))) or {}
# formerly:
# video = try_get(response, lambda x: x['result']['video'][0], dict) or {}
description = video.get('summary')
duration = float_or_none(video.get('durationMs'), scale=1000)
view_count = int_or_none(video.get('views'))

Suppose you've extracted JSON like this into a Python data structure named media_json using, say, the _download_json() or _parse_json() methods of InfoExtractor:

{
    "title": "Example video",
    "comment": "try extracting this",
    "media": [{
        "type": "bad",
        "size": 320,
        "url": "https://some.cdn.site/bad.mp4"
    }, {
        "type": "streaming",
        "url": "https://some.cdn.site/hls.m3u8"
    }, {
        "type": "super",
        "size": 1280,
        "url": "https://some.cdn.site/good.webm"
    }],
    "moreStuff": "more values",
    ...
}

Then extractor code like this can collect the various fields of the JSON:

...
from ..utils import (
    determine_ext,
    int_or_none,
    T,
    traverse_obj,
    txt_or_none,
    url_or_none,
)
...
        ...
        info_dict = {}
        # extract title and description if valid and not empty
        info_dict.update(traverse_obj(media_json, {
            'title': ('title', T(txt_or_none)),
            'description': ('comment', T(txt_or_none)),
        }))

        # extract any recognisable media formats
        fmts = []
        # traverse into "media" list, extract `dict`s with desired keys
        for fmt in traverse_obj(media_json, ('media', Ellipsis, {
                'format_id': ('type', T(txt_or_none)),
                'url': ('url', T(url_or_none)),
                'width': ('size', T(int_or_none)), })):
            # bad `fmt` values were `None` and removed
            if 'url' not in fmt:
                continue
            fmt_url = fmt['url']  # known to be valid URL
            ext = determine_ext(fmt_url)
            if ext == 'm3u8':
                fmts.extend(self._extract_m3u8_formats(fmt_url, video_id, 'mp4', fatal=False))
            else:
                fmt['ext'] = ext
                fmts.append(fmt)

        # sort, raise if no formats
        self._sort_formats(fmts)

        info_dict['formats'] = fmts
        ...

The extractor raises an exception rather than random crashes if the JSON structure changes so that no formats are found.

Be sure to follow instructions provided below and in the issue tracker. Complete the appropriate issue template fully. Consider whether your problem is covered by an existing issue: if so, follow the discussion there. Avoid commenting on existing duplicate issues as such comments do not add to the discussion of the issue and are liable to be treated as spam.

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 <your command line>
[debug] System config: []
[debug] User config: []
[debug] Command-line args: [u'-v', u'https://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 logs; only plain text is acceptable.

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.

Finally please review your issue to avoid various common mistakes (you can and should use this as a checklist) listed below.

We often get issue reports that are hard to understand. To avoid subsequent clarifications, and to assist participants who are not native English speakers, please elaborate on what feature you are requesting, or what bug you want to be fixed.

Make sure that it's obvious

• What the problem is
• How it could be fixed
• How your proposed solution would look

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\c .

Site support requests must contain an example URL. An example URL is a URL you might want to download, like https://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. https://www.youtube.com/) is not an example URL.

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\c  of this repository. Initially, at least, use the search term -label:duplicate to focus on active 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.

Before reporting any issue, type youtube-dl -U. This should report that you're up-to-date. About 20% of the reports we receive are already fixed, but people are using outdated versions. This goes for feature requests as well.

Before requesting a new feature, please have a quick peek at the list of supported options\c . Many feature requests are for features that actually exist already! Please, absolutely do show off your work in the issue report and detail how the existing similar options do not solve your problem.

People want to solve problems, and often think they do us a favor by breaking down their larger problems (e.g. wanting to skip already downloaded files) to a specific request (e.g. requesting us to look whether the file exists before downloading the info page). However, what often happens is that they break down the problem into two steps: One simple, and one impossible (or extremely complicated one).

We are then presented with a very complicated request when the original problem could be solved far easier, e.g. by recording the downloaded video IDs in a separate file. To avoid this, you must include the greater context where it is non-obvious. In particular, every feature request that does not consist of adding support for a new site should contain a use case scenario that explains in what situation the missing feature would be useful.

Some of our users seem to think there is a limit of issues they can or should open. There is no limit of issues they can or should open. While it may seem appealing to be able to dump all your issues into one ticket, that means that someone who solves one of your issues cannot mark the issue as closed. Typically, reporting a bunch of issues leads to the ticket lingering since nobody wants to attack that behemoth, until someone mercifully splits the issue into multiple ones.

In particular, every site support request issue should only pertain to services at one site (generally under a common domain, but always using the same backend technology). Do not request support for vimeo user videos, White house podcasts, and Google Plus pages in the same issue. Also, make sure that you don't post bug reports alongside feature requests. As a rule of thumb, a feature request does not include outputs of youtube-dl that are not immediately related to the feature at hand. Do not post reports of a network error alongside the request for a new video service.

Only post features that you (or an incapacitated friend you can personally talk to) require. Do not post features because they seem like a good idea. If they are really useful, they will be requested by someone who requires them.

It may sound strange, but some bug reports we receive are completely unrelated to youtube-dl and relate to a different, or even the reporter's own, application. Please make sure that you are actually using youtube-dl. If you are using a UI for youtube-dl, report the bug to the maintainer of the actual application providing the UI. On the other hand, if your UI for youtube-dl fails in some way you believe is related to youtube-dl, by all means, go ahead and report the bug.