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Comment by thwythwy | Hacker News Reader

Does this play nice with Python youtube-dl? [1] [2]. I want to run a python script on my computer that captures youtube audio of certain government meetings without first having to dl the entire video and convert it (while doing a bunch of other stuff before and after automatically, all without me touching anything).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/27473526/download-only-a...

[2] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39665160/youtube-dl-pyth...

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Unless you need to convert the audio format, I don't think you need ffmpeg at all - youtube-dl can just download the audio stream and save it to a file. Just list the available formats from a video and choose an audio-only format.

Also, IIRC youtube-dl will automatically re-encode it using ffmpeg if you pick an unavailable format!

Insome cases youtube-dl downloads the content via ffmpeg, see [1]

[1] https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl/blob/c3bcd206eb031de3...

will try thank you

Not sure what you mean, you're able to easily just use youtube-dl to download the audio only. Is the conversion suppose to change it into a certain filetype or something?

You neither need youtube-dl nor ffmpeg for that. JS userscript and wget is enough. Every YT page includes an array with links to all video/audio sources.

Try eg `youtube-dl -f 140 <URL>` to download just the .m4a audio stream.

`youtube-dl -F <URL>` will display the available formats.

youtube-dl -x <url> uses ffmpeg out of the box to extract mp3 audio from a video.

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