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Comment by thot_experiment | Hacker News Reader

just put yt-dlp on your path and you can do this without sharing your data with some weird SEO garbager

it's so lamentable that putting a binary on your path is too technical for most people these days as the user experience is so so much better than any other option, anytime I want to share a short form video i can Ctrl + L -> Ctrl + C to get the link, Ctrl + R to summon a command prompt, type `ytdl` Shift + Insert to paste the url and then I can drag the resultant file into whatever sharing tool I want to use, guaranteeing it's never going to be taken offline and whoever I'm sharing with doesn't need to have an account or solve a captcha or something else dumb

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I agree with you that yt-dlp is the most practical way to do this stuff, but that simply isn't clear to most folks.

Pretend you don't know how to download videos, the first thing you do is google "how to download youtube videos". The result? A whole lot of bad advice-- sketchy websites, clickbait videos, advice to pay for youtube premium, warnings that it's illegal and that google can cut off your access, vlc player can do it apparently, and then finally inside a reddit thread someone writes "yt-dlp is the best" (nothing else, no link). One would think that google itself has an interest in keeping this information away from people :-).

I can't even remember how I first found it myself!

Well if yt-dlp is "too technical", there is always Open Video Downloader https://github.com/jely2002/youtube-dl-gui

Which is a GUI wrapper around it.

I previously used yt-dl, then yt-dlp. So for it works nice.

But, CLI only can be intimidating for non-tech users. Let's say there are multiple high resolutions of a video: 1280x720, 1920x1080, 2650x1440, 3840x2160 etc. By default, yt-dlp will fetch the highest one, which is 3840x2160. I want 1920x1080 instead. What I do is fetch the 1920x1080 video and the highest quality audio, then join those with ffmpeg.

A GUI to easily do that is definitely a nice addition.

    ytdl -f "bestvideo[height<=1440]+bestaudio/best[height<=1440]" --add-metadata --no-mtime --sponsorblock-remove default %* -o C:\tmp\ytdl%%(title)s-%%(id)s.%%(ext)s --exec ""c:\Program Files\VideoLAN\VLC\vlc.exe" --one-instance --playlist-enqueue {}"

This is the batch file I use on my gaming/media machine, you can season to taste (replace 1440 w/ 1080)

yt-dlp is great, fortunately for us not everyone is a software engineer

Good advice, thank you.

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