Youtube-dl (rg3.github.io)

Take a look at the "new" section!

As I recall, it was originally written by one person (Ricardo Garcia) in 2008 and worked only on YouTube using (by later standards) relatively simple heuristics to find the URL to extract the video. But it's catalyzed an explosion of interest in every aspect of the problem: tracking changes to the HTML of the video sites, adding support for more video sites, figuring out indirection and parsing through multiple pages and HTML objects, making the tool much more multiplatform and easier to install and update...

It's attracted hundreds of contributors (many of them motivated by a personal desire to be able to use the tool on a different site, or to fix a bug that was preventing them from downloading video in a particular rare case) and maintained an incredibly rapid pace of development.

youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 OKbtC223e30

  > youtube-dl -F OKbtC223e30
  139         m4a       audio only  DASH audio   49k , audio@ 48k (22050Hz), 525.88KiB (worst)
  171         webm      audio only  DASH audio  129k , audio@128k (44100Hz), 1.27MiB
  140         m4a       audio only  DASH audio  129k , audio@128k (44100Hz), 1.36MiB
  172         webm      audio only  DASH audio  176k , audio@256k (44100Hz), 1.78MiB
  141         m4a       audio only  DASH audio  255k , audio@256k (44100Hz), 2.71MiB

(Edit) Answering my own question, apparently yes!

Same question for clive/cclive...

By the way, FFmpeg has support for the 0.4 branch of libquvi, so if you built it with --enable-libquvi you can ffmpeg -i http://youtube... (assuming libquvi and its scripts still work)

https://pypi.python.org/pypi/livestreamer/1.10.2

    ytplay() { youtube-dl "$1" -o - | vlc -; }

If not, please share me a YT link.

    youtube-dl --get-url "$1" | xargs mplayer

And I must say I'm impressed by its ease of use (basically zero installation effort), and also by the frequent updates.

(I wonder why those frequent updates are necessary, though. Are you under the impression that google is actively working against tools which attempt to download material from youtube?)

Do you think DRM support in browsers and major tube sites will soon prevent tools like youtube-dl from functioning?

I vastly prefer offline media players to browser-based tools, for a number of reasons: better controls and playback, richer features, uniform features (I don't have to learn each individual site's idiosyncracies), the ability to queue up a set of media from numerous sources and play them back without clobbering one another, and more.

Hugely useful tool, and I've been impressed as hell as well by its update frequency.

And lift a mug to old Warthog. I miss Joe as well.

I setup a makefile to let me just go make and then eventually vlc pops up with stuff to watch every so often. Its quite nice.

https://github.com/mitchty/youtubes/blob/master/Makefile

Also, what always impressed me is the incredible amount of random contributions from the community. Ever since we introduced a super-simple plugin system [0], support for the most disparate video sites poured in as PR. (>800 PR!!) Also, given how ytdl is structured, the most simple plugin gets you 90% of the tool power for that video sit. Big results with minimum effort.

Finally, to answer the question about the updates in some siblings, there is no active effort against us most of the time (VEVO videos being the notable exception) but supporting such a number of sites mainly by scraping means that breaking changes happen really really often.

[0] https://filippo.io/add-support-for-a-new-video-site-to-youtu...

As the catalyst and original dev for this tool, Thank you!

   # this script uses sh, sed, awk, tr and some http client
   # here, some http client = tnftp
   # awk and tr are optional
   
   
   # wrapper for tnftp to accept urls from stdin
   ftp1(){
   while read a;do 
   ftp ${@--4vdo-} "$a" 
   done;}
   
   
   # uniq
   awk1(){ awk '!($0 in a){a[$0];print}' ;}
   
   
   # some url decoding
   f1(){
   sed '
   s,%3D,=,g;
   s,%3A,:,g;
   s,%2F,/,g;
   s,%3F,?,g;
   s/^M      
   //g;
   #  ^ thats Ctrl-V then Ctrl-M in vi   
   ' 
   }
   
   # remove redundant itags
   f0(){
   sed -e '
   s/&itag=5//;t1
   s/&itag=1[78]//;t1
   s/&itag=22//;t1
   s/&itag=3[4-8]//;t1
   s/&itag=4[3-6]//;t1
   s/&itag=1[346][0-9]//;t1
   ' -e :1
   }
   
   # separate urls 
   f2(){
   sed '
   s,http,\
   &,g' 
   }
   
   # remove unneeded lines
   f3(){
   sed '
   #/^http%3A%2F.*c.youtube.com/!d;
   /^http%3A%2F.*googlevideo.com/!d;
   /crossdomain.xml/d;
   s/%25/%/g;
   s,sig=,\&signature=,;
   s,\\u0026,\&,g;
   /&author=.*/d;
   ' 
   }
   
   
   
   # separate cgi arguments for debugging
   f4(){
   sed '
   s,%26,\
   ,g;
   s,&,\
   ,g;
   ' 
   }
   
   # remove more unneeded lines
   f5(){
   sed '
   /./!d;
   /quality=/d;
   /type=/d;
   /fallback_host=/d;
   /url=/d;
   /^http:/!s/^/\&/
   /^[^h].*:/d;
   /^http:.*doubleclick.net/d;
   /itag.*,/d;
   '
   }
   
   # print urls 
   f6(){
   sed 's/^http:/\
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   |sed '
   s/http:/\
   &/g;
   ' 
   }
   
   f8(){
   sed 's/https:/http:/'
   }
   
   FTPUSERAGENT="like OSX"
   
   case $# in
   0) 
   echo|$0 -h 
    ;;
   [12345])
   case $1 in
   
   -h|--h)
   echo "url=http[s]://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..........."
   echo usage1: echo url\|$0 -F \(get itag-no\'s\)
   echo usage2: echo url\|$0 -g \(get download urls\)
   echo usage3: echo url\|$0 -fitag-no -4o video-file
   echo N.B. no space permitted after -f
   
    ;;
   -F)
   $0 -g \
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   |sed '
   /,/d;
   /itag=[0-9]/!d;
   s/itag=//;
   /^17$/s/$/ 3GP/;
   /^36$/s/$/ 3GP/;
   /^[56]$/s/$/ FLV/;
   /^3[45]$/s/$/ FLV/;
   /^18$/s/$/ MP4/;
   /^22$/s/$/ MP4/;
   /^3[78]$/s/$/ MP4/;
   /^8[2-5]$/s/$/ MP4/;
   s/.*?//;
   '|awk1
    ;;

   -g)
   while read a;do
   n=1
   while [ $n -le 10 ];do
   echo $a|f8|ftp1||
   echo $a|f8|ftp1 &&
   break
   n=$((n+1))
   done \
   |f2|f3|f1|f0|f4|f5|f6|f1|sed '/itag='"$2"'/!d'
   done
    ;;

   -f*)
   while read a;do
   n=1
   while [ $n -le 10 ];do
   echo $a|$0 -g ${1#-f} |ftp1 $2 $3 $4 $5 ||
   echo $a|$0 -g ${1#-f} |ftp1 $2 $3 $4 $5  && 
   break
   n=$((n+1))
   done
   done
    ;;

   esac
   esac