I’m looking to download a number of educational youtube videos for future reference. Looking for a reliable way to download videos. OS is Ubuntu. FF extensions and docker containers all good. I don’t really want to install an executable on bare metal unless it is a flatpak.
My goal is for the downloaded videos to be accessed locally via jellyfin. Jellyfin is already sorted.
Thanks in advance for your recommendations!
I always use yt-dlp do download youtube videos. It doesn’t require installation, you just download and run it.
I was just looking at this. Do you typically run it behind a VPN or do you expose your actual IP?
I’ve never used a VPN with it.
I’ve never used a VPN with it either. But it should work, especially with an exit node in a country where Google has no incentive to/is prohibited from interfering with third party viewers.
but unless i am missing some edge case, there isn’t really a reason, downloading video from youtube is perfectly legal, it wouldn’t work otherwise after all
Love the handle, BTW. :)
I think downloading is against Google’s TOS. Whether that makes it illegal is a question for a lawyer.
okay. Thanks. Gonna give it a go. It seems to be the one everyone is using.
Yeah, I used to use yt-dl(whatever) but Seal is just so much more convenient
No need of VPN. But it wouldn’t harm if you wanted to have more privacy
I use it all the time without any VPN and haven’t had any issues. I watch almost all youtube videos in MPV, which uses yt-dlp to get the video. I download any video I may want to watch again later to my server.
yt-dlp, full hd quality, best audio, reading from a txt file for every URL
yt-dlp with a couple scripts I wrote, depending on the usecase.
+1 for yt-dlp
jdownloader2 also works for this
https://github.com/trizen/pipe-viewer mobile and desktop
on android: ytldnis
[i only trust the github one]Seal is another great downloader for Android
Just used this to load up some concerts for my long haul flights tonight and it worked great, thanks for the rec
If you’re into selfhosting I’ve heard good things about tube archivist. It integrates with jellyfin
I use a yt-dlp frontend like clipgrap or seal
TubeArchivist with a browser extension to easily download any interesting video I want to preserve.
I have pending to link TubeArchivist to jellyfin for a more convenient frontend for my videos.
yt-dlp is pretty much the standard program for it https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
It is installable as a python module, so it should be easy to sandbox if you need to (though it requires ffmpeg too). Nowadays I almost view it as a standard unix utility though and wouldn’t think twice about installing the native package
Cobalt is an awesome downloader, if the main instance (cobalt.tools) ever goes down or gets blocked by YouTube, there are countless other instances: https://instances.hyper.lol/instances/
It’s really a great project, make sure to promote it, give it a star on GitHub, maybe donate a few bucks (crypto addresses can be found when clicking on the donate button in the app)
On my phone i use tubular, which is a fork of NewPipe with sponsor block added.
You should listen to all the yt-dlp comments, but I’ve always had trouble getting all the yt-dl variants to just download the best version and subtitles consistently.
I use 4K Video Downloader, and it’s easier to use. It has a 30 video per day limit is all, which is more than I need.
WDYM you’ve had difficulty?? Isn’t it just --embedded-subs or something?
Maybe the command line version is consistent, but day to day I prefer not to do command line. I’ve tried like 5 different GUIs and they all have failed downloads, incorrect formats, and other issues just doing test downloads. I don’t know why, but it’s been a problem every time for me.
Well there’s your problem.
Learn how to actually use a computer.
Huh… That’s really not nice.
If you want to use a computer you’re going to need to learn how to use it.
It’s not reasonable to expect maintainers of a very nice Python CLI tool to also maintain a GUI that works perfectly with it. Just look at the manpage if you need to find an option.
the best version is always the default for me on yt-dlp, that and
--embed-subshas always worked perfectly for me, weird you’ve had issues with it, this is the first I’ve heard of anyone having that problem.
