You Dl

A tiny and easy to use YouTube downloader.

Installation

On macOS (or Linux) via Homebrew

brew tap l-oris/you-dl
brew install you-dl

On Ubuntu (and other Debian-based Linux distributions)

Download the latest .deb package from the release page and install it via:

sudo dpkg -i you-dl-amd64.deb

Usage

you-dl <url>...

# read the URLs from a text file (lines starting with `#` and `//` are ignored)
you-dl --from-file <path_to_file>

# change output directory
you-dl --output-dir <path_to_dir> <url>...

Try it out

you-dl --output-dir ./Videos \
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MAlSjtxy5ak \
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jOV0gaNKj0 \
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVjsCYlc1IY

Limitations

Most videos uploaded by verified channels are protected: their media streams cannot be directly accessed by URL. To download them, their signatures need to be deciphered and their URLs modified appropriately.

It wasn’t my goal to provide a full-fledged replacement for youtube-dl and I didn’t pursue this feature altogether. If you're interested, you can find out more here: https://tyrrrz.me/blog/reverse-engineering-youtube

That said, it would be annoying to keep using two separate tools for downloading YouTube videos. For this reason, you-dl includes a wrapper around youtube-dl, which gives access to a larger number of resources without sacrificing the easy-to-use aspect of this tool. To trigger this functionality, simply pass the -w flag:

you-dl -w <url>...