youtube-dl Command to Download Youtube Videos from Linux Command Line

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, and it is not platform specific. It should work on your Unix box, on Windows or on Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like.

Using this command you can choose different video qualities or video formats or let the program itself automatically download higher quality video from the site. It also has supports for user specific playlist downloads, options to add custom or original title to the downloaded video file. proxy support and many more.

Installing YouTube-DL in Fedora or CentOS

yum install youtube-dl

Installing YouTube-DL in Ubuntu or Linux Mint

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

How to Download Videos using YouTube-DL

Go to your terminal and enter youtube-dl followed by the video URL

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbbTqSKxH30

youtube-dl

If you want to choose the video format, you can do it by entering

youtube-dl -F https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbbTqSKxH30

Now you can select the format that you want to download by selecting the format code

youtube-dl -f 136 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbbTqSKxH30

youtube-dl -f 17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbbTqSKxH30

Update YouTube-DL

You can update youtube-dl to the latest version using the below command

youtube-dl -U  

Similarly if you enter youtube-dl --help in the terminal you will get many other options for downloading the videos