Whenever I had to download a video from Youtube I’d use the online service keepvid.com. I know there exists tons of Youtube Downloaders out there and I even downloaded and test ‘youtube-dl’. In the beginning I didn’t really like it since I found that the download size would be huge. Well … I simply had been lazy to check out all the download options. It’s not until a colleague at work pinged me with the nice features/options of youtube-dl that I started using the tool again.

I know youtube-dl is already on the Ubuntu/Mint repos. So, you could simply install it as :

apt-get install youtube-dl

If you have enabled Packman repos, then it should be available via zypper on openSUSE. Otherwise you could download and install the latest version from the official website.

wget http://youtube-dl.org/downloads/2013.02.25/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

To view the list of available formats to download from :

youtube-dl -F http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCoOgRPLtgs

The output should be something like :

ish@inote:~> youtube-dl -F http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCoOgRPLtgs
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] mCoOgRPLtgs: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] mCoOgRPLtgs: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] mCoOgRPLtgs: Extracting video information
Available formats:
34      :       flv     [360x640]
18      :       mp4     [360x640]
43      :       webm    [360x640]
5       :       flv     [240x400]
17      :       mp4     [144x176]

Choose the corresponding number for the format and resolution you want to download.

youtube-dl -f 18 -t http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mCoOgRPLtgs

-f specifies the format number
-t keeps the video title