Ask HN: How are you downloading YouTube videos? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are you downloading YouTube videos?

43 pointspmoriarty36 comments

Now that youtube-dl is gone, how are you downloading youtube videos?

VLC.

Open the URL in VLC, then in video info the actual video file will be listed. Paste that into your browser of choice and Save As.

Thank you! But can you please go into details. For example, I have a youtube link on my clipboard and I tried VLC > Media > Open Location from Clipboard > and I see a new '(null)' entry in my VLC playlist. I am stuck here.

Wasn't aware this was possible. Finally, I am no longer dependent on 3rd party tools for dl'ing yt vids.

This is mind blowing. Thanks a lot for sharing it. HN never seem to disappoint.

Suprised these don't get blocked when viewed in a browser normally.

Not quite that simple.

I brought up YouTube, clicked on sample video, dragged it into VLC where it displayed.

There is no "video info" in latest VLC download, there is >tools>media info, which at the very bottom yields location:

I copied pasted that URL in location: (https://r2---sn-bg5oqxjvh-xa2e.googlevideo.com . . . . . ) into Firefox and it would not resolve.

youtube-dl isn't gone though? just the github repository is gone.

Nice try RIAA ;)

I still use it daily. I follow channels using their RSS feed instead of using the YouTube website, and when a new video is posted, I download it with youtube-dl (which is configured to send the video to /tmp) and watch.

For my use case, it still works fine. Once it stops working I can look for an alternative, I guess.

Following channels via RSS feed is what finally helped me stop endlessly scrolling YouTube looking for another video to watch. I seriously suggest switching to it if anyone hasn’t yet.

That's a pretty cool setup

I'm pressing right mouse button twice (first shows the YouTube menu, second the browser one) then save as (or view video then save as), in Firefox with media.mediasource.mp4.enabled=false - so maximal resolution which I can get and I'm happy with is 720px.

Still use youtube-dl for now but have heard good things about annie

https://github.com/iawia002/annie

Given that (IIRC) part of the RIAA's complaint about youtube-dl was the presence of copyrighted videos in the README, I would give grave consideration to finding a new URL to serve as an example of its abilities

    $ annie https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
    
     Site:      YouTube youtube.com
     Title:     Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Video)

It seems there's even an issue for it: https://github.com/iawia002/annie/issues/811 but there doesn't seem to be any comment on whether the project's maintainers agree

Is youtube-dl going to stop working? I assumed the problem was limited to having the repository taken down, but are they pushing to get the service to be defunct entirely? Short of not allowing them to publish the code or executables anywhere, that would require legislation passed to prevent existing and future packages in Linux repositories to be banned, or a major change in how it interacts with YouTube from YouTube's end to render it useless.

> Is youtube-dl going to stop working?

`youtube-dl` requires constant maintenance as websites change. So yes, it’s going to stop working if development halts, one site breaking at a time.

Are there indications that development will halt, though? That was my question. Being deplatformed from github doesn't stop them from maintaining it, even if it might reduce the visibility/number of PRs.

If youtube-dl fails then I will resort to using the latest version of uGet since it does not rely on youtube-dl as a backend.

uGet is not flawless, there have been some instances where the audio of a downloaded video does not work. The default resolution downloaded is 360p, this can change this in the settings.

https://repology.org/project/uget/versions

Dumb question: Why would you download videos from youtube? Are you collecting videos on your hard drive? Why not just save a bookmark? I don't think youtube will be scrapped anytime soon.

I just want to understand what are the use cases for this.

YouTube videos get pulled down all the time, for all sorts of reasons. This has bitten me numerous times when going back to some tutorial videos I'd bookmarked, only to find they'd been deleted by the poster.

dont u ever lost a video or needed to use it offline to watch in a tv or other places with bad wifi?

youtube-dl is _not gone_. New version just got released.

I noticed today that youtube-dl was no longer working. I am on the latest version so there is no update that will fix things right now.

It wasn't hard to whip up a cli wrapper for NewPipeExtractor which I am already using on my phone for Youtube via Newpipe.

It is pretty limited currently, but sufficient for my purposes.

JDownloader - https://jdownloader.org/

It's a bit sketchy but the 'LinkGrabber' feature is great for downloading anything from anywhere.

Internet Download Manager on Windows is an amazing grabber, not just for YouTube, but all other videos and files and documents.

with this https://github.com/kkdai/youtube

you-get works great. Appears very similar to youtube-dl, better CLI display, seems to take slightly longer to start downloading. I've only tried it on youtube though.

https://you-get.org/

Related: is there a surviving fork that only extracts non-copyrighted content (e.g metadata) ?

Yes: http://github.com/l1ving/youtube-dl

Still using youtube-dl but will probably be using youtube-dlc in the not too distant future.

What's the difference between the two? I can't really tell.

One more time RIAA:

The Internet Interprets Censorship As Damage And Routes Around It.

Easy YouTube Downloader Express. Works up to 720p.

I am using y2mate[dot]guru to download

streamlink

Almost makes you wonder if Google/Spotify/Apple co-signed the takedown. Who else would give a shit?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com