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Comment by fcpguru | Hacker News Reader

Show me a screen recording of this working. Run yt-dlp and get an mp4 and open in quicktime. I get error every time single.

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You can use the -F flag to list all of the available formats, then --merge-output-format mp4 of audio and video formats that will work best for Quicktime at the desired resolution.

can you show me proof of this working? Unless you are re-encoding the mp4 there's no way quicktime will be able to open a youtube mp4.

Here’s your proof:

  yt-dlp --format 18 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWxh9lGOeqQ' --output 'FuckingGenius.mp4' && open -a 'QuickTime Player' 'FuckingGenius.mp4'

No reencoding, just getting a video straight from YouTube and playing it in QuickTime Player.

yt-dlp -f "bv*[vcodec^=avc1][ext=mp4]+ba[acodec^=mp4a][ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4][vcodec^=avc1]" \ --merge-output-format mp4 \ -o "%(title)s.mp4" \ "YOUTUBE_URL_HERE"

Thanks. I played around with your idea and got this. It’s still not 100% of videos. Only YouTube videos that have any H.264+AAC stream available (which is 99.9% of public YouTube today, even if the main/default version is VP9 or AV1).

But re encoding to solve this is not required. I stand corrected.

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