youtube-dl is an Open Source command line tool that lets you download video from YouTube (and many other videos sites). It’s often considered better than those paid video downloaders. In our previous article, we saw how to use youtube-dl to download videos on Android terminal. Even Windows has a YouTube GUI client, there are no such resources available for macOS. So, in this article, we’ll give you a walkthrough on how to install youtube dl on mac. Let’s begin.
![]()
By default youtube-dl downloads files in the same directory from where you run the command. Mostly it's your home directory. If your name is Tom, then it is /home/Tom. To force it to download elsewhere you should use -o option; and to select quality of video, there is -f option. 18 hours ago Before downloading the Dropbox App, when downloading files from the web they would automatically save to my 'Downloads' folder. Now that I have the Dropbox app installed, I need to specify it's location in Dropbox every time I try to download something. Open the file named youtube-dl.conf. If it does not exist, create one. Then enter the options that youtube-dl should take as default while downloading the videos.
Read: 5 best ways to Password Protect folders on mac
youtube-dl Installation
1. To install, youtube-dl, you need to install Wget first. And in order to install Wget, you need to install homebrew first. So, copy paste the following command on your Mac’s terminal (press cmd + space and type in terminal). Once you run the following command, you Mac will download Homebrew master file from Github. You may have to enter your Mac’s password several times. The whole process will take 10-15 minutes depending on your Internet speed.
2. Once you have downloaded Homebrew, you are ready to install Wget. Type in the following command and also enable OpenSSL for TLS support.
3. Now that we have Wget to download packages from the internet, we will use it to download and install Youtube-dl package. Type in the following command and press enter.
4. You have now successfully installed youtube-dl on your Mac, however, it won’t work yet. To check you can type youtube-dl on your terminal and it’ll throw a permission error. To fix this, you need to give the right permissions, type in the following command and press enter.
5. And that’s it, now you should be able to download YouTube videos (or any videos from youtube-dl supported sites) by simply typing youtube-dl [video-link]. For example, to download one of my videos from YouTube, I’ll type in the following command.
youtube-dl https://youtu.be/LxTcvc4cgCY
6. You can find the downloaded video in your home folder on your mac. To bring up the home folder simply go to Finder > Go > Home or press the keyboard shortcut CMD + Shift + H.
Must Read: 10 Free macOS apps to boost your Productivity
Download 1080p video using FFmpeg
By default, FFmpeg will download the second highest resolution. You may have to install FFmpeg to get the highest quality video. Without FFmpeg, you will likely get the second highest which in our case was 720p. To install FFmpeg, type in the following command.
Youtube-dl Default Download Location Mac Osbrew install youtube-dl ffmpeg
Also Read: 5 ways to transfer files from mac to mac
![]() Wrapping Up
So, this is how you use youtube-dl to download videos using your terminal. The app works exactly as advertised, yet not many people know about it. Anyway, if you wish to change your download location or download different resolution of the video, you can check out youtube-dl command line parameters on Github.
If you wish to download a YouTube video to store locally on your computer, you can do so on a Mac OS X system, and Linux systems, also, usingyoutuble-dl, a Python script. You can also download aMicrosoft Windows exe file from the youtube-dl DownloadPage. With youtube-dl, you can download videos from YouTube and othersites from a command-line interface (CLI).
For a Mac OS X system, you can obtain the script using the curl utility that is providedwith the operating system. You can also use curl on a Linux system, if you have it installed on that system. Alternatively, you can usewget, which isn't provided with the OS X system, but which you may have on a Linux system, ifyou don't have curl available. To obtain the youtube-dl script using curl ona Mac OS X system, you can open a Terminal window and issue the command
sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl . That will download the script and place it in the /usr/local/bin directory.
Once you've downloaded it, you can make it available for execution by allaccounts on the system using the command
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl to change the file permissions, since it won't by default be executable.
If you need to use Wget, instead, you can use the commands below:
Once you've downloaded the file and made it executable, you can get help onusing the program by typing
youtube-dl -h at a shell prompt, e.g., a Terminal window.
Youtube Dl Download For Windows
To download a video, you can simply type
youtube-dl url where url is the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the video you wish to download. E.g.:
Youtube-dl Default Download Location Mac Free
In the above example, I would have a MPEG_4(MP4) video file in the current working directory.
Comments are closed.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2020
Categories |