Download YouTube in batch


Created on 2017-04-27 Last Modified 2018-07-23

youtube-dl

Sometime I have to download many YouTube videos or songs, if you are using mac or linux, youtube-dl would be a very handy and useful tool to get the job done. youtube-dl is a command-line interface application which the plain text environment may deter you to give a try, but once you can get used to it, you will find that using command-line application somehow are much easier than GUI (Graphical User Interface) application. As I am a mac user, so this tutorial are only use mac’s command-line as an example.

Homebrew - The missing package manager for macOS

Unlike linux, macOS didn’t ship with package manager but you can download it, many command-line apps can be downloaded and installed through homebrew.

Installation of homebrew is easy, first open your spotlight in macOS and search for terminal app, copy and paste the following code in terminal app and press enter, then wait for the installation finish.

/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

To test the installation completed successfully, you may type brew -v in terminal which will show the version of homebrew you just downloaded, keeping in latest release is important, you may use the command brew update to update to the latest version and also the latest formulaes (the latest version of applications which you can download through homebrew), you may also use brew -help to list the homebrew commands.

Once you download and installed homebrew, next we will use homebrew to download youtube-dl for our goal.

Using brew search command to see if you can download youtube-dl, once you success, the terminal will return the success message (a ✔ next to youtube-dl).

brew search youtube-dl

Next, you can install youtube-dl by using brew install command.

brew install youtube-dl

How to navigate in terminal?

Before we move to the next step, we should get a bit familiar with the command-line environment first, I would like to introduce 3 simple commands first to make you feel better to move on to the next stage.

  • ls are used to list all files in your current folder.
  • cd command mean change directory, you can navigate to folder by typing cd FOLDER_NAME, we often use this command together with ls.
  • open are used to open the files or folder, let’s say you want to open the current location in macOS Finder App, then you can type open . the dot notation after open means current location.

Example:

type cd ~ to go to HOME directory then type ls to list all files and folder in your HOME directory.

Documents    Dropbox     Music     Public    Applications
Desktop      Downloads   Movies    Pictures

you can go to your Desktop folder by this command cd Desktop and open Desktop in Finder by open . .

To simply the actions, you can use cd ~/Desktop, which have exactly same result to the following commands.

cd ~
cd Desktop

Using the youtube-dl command

Now, let’s move on to youtube-dl command, assuming that you would like to download a video from YouTube, i.e. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNEnzNHTkd8, then you just have to type the link followed by youtube-dl command, in case you would like to download the video to your desktop, then you can use cd command to go to desktop directory first, like this.

cd ~/Desktop
youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JNEnzNHTkd8

In case you just want to grab the audio output from a video, then you can flag the --extract-audio and use --audio-format=FORMAT_YOU_WANT, here is the example.

youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=m4a  https://www.youtube.com/watch\?v\=JNEnzNHTkd8

Conclusion

Today I introduced several command-line commands, first, we have cd command to change the directory, ls command to list all the files in current directory, open . command to open current directory, besides, after install homebrew and youtube-dl, you can download YouTube video or audio source just through your finger tips.

TL;DR

If you want to download YouTube Video in batch, you can use the snippet below.

cat << EOF | xargs -I@ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=@
YouTubeVideoID-1
YouTubeVideoID-2
YouTubeVideoID-3
EOF

Useful options

  • --extract-audio for download audio only
  • --audio-format mp3 choose the audio format
  • --audio-quality 2 set the audio quality, 0(best)-9(worst), (default 5)
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