<p>In Windows, once you have installed the Python interpreter, save the program with the <em>.py</em> extension and put it somewhere in the PATH. Try to follow the <ahref="windows.html">guide to install youtube-dl under Windows</a>.</p>
<p>In Unix, download it, give it execution permission and copy it to one of the PATH directories (typically, <em>/usr/local/bin</em>).</p>
<p>After that, you should be able to call it from the command line as <em>youtube-dl</em> or <em>youtube-dl.py</em>. I will use <em>youtube-dl</em> in the following examples. Usage instructions are easy. Use <em>youtube-dl</em> followed by a video URL or identifier. Example: <em>youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobar"</em>. The video will be saved to the file <em>foobar.flv</em> in that example. As YouTube.com videos are usually in Flash Video format, their extension should be <em>flv</em>. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of <em>ffmpeg</em> can play them. That includes VLC, MPlayer, etc. Those two work under Windows and other platforms, but you could also get a specific FLV player of your taste.</p>
<p>If you try to run the program and you receive an error message containing the keyword <em>SyntaxError</em> near the end, it means your Python interpreter is too old or from the 3.x branch.</p>
<p>The program is usually invoked as <em>youtube-dl</em> followed by options and the video URLs. Listing all the options here would make this text too long, so you can run <em>youtube-dl --help</em> and get a summary of them. From that point on you can start experimenting with the different options yourself. The most common ones are -t (or -l) to include the video title in the file name. Also, the -o option can specify the output file name and path. It allows special character sequences that can be used as templates to be replaced. See the "Output template" section for more details.</p>
<p>Some YouTube videos are served using Adobe's proprietary RTMP protocol, which imposes DRM restrictions and encrypts the connection. <em>youtube-dl</em> is not able to download these videos by itself. However, it will attempt to use the <ahref="http://rtmpdump.mplayerhq.hu/">rtmpdump</a> program, if it's installed in your system, to download these videos.</p>
<p>The <ahref="faq.html">Frequently Asked Questions</a> page contains answers to some common questions that pop up in my e-mail and in the <ahref="https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues">issue tracker</a>. Be sure to check it before reporting problems.</p>
<li>YouTube.com playlists (playlist URLs in "view_play_list" form).</li>
<li>YouTube.com searches, using the special keyword "ytsearch" as a form of URL, as in "ytsearch:cute kittens". Do not forget the quotes if you want to include spaces in your search. Other variants are "ytsearchN" to download more than the first result, with N being a number, and "ytsearchall".</li>
<p>youtube-dl supports downloading videos through a proxy, by setting the <em>http_proxy</em> environment variable to the proxy URL, as in <code>http://proxy_machine_name:port/</code>.</p>
<p>Using the -f option and other related options, you can specify the video format to be downloaded from YouTube. Instead of keeping a video format table here, I will refer you to the <ahref="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Quality_and_codecs">list of YouTube formats on Wikipedia</a>.</p>
<p>The -o option allows users to indicate a template for the output file names. The basic usage is not to set any template arguments when downloading a single file, like in <em>youtube-dl -o funny_video.flv "http://some/video"</em>. However, it may contain special sequences that will be replaced when downloading each video. The special sequences have the format <strong>%(NAME)s</strong>. To clarify, that's a percent symbol followed by a name in parenthesis, followed by a lowercase S. Allowed names are:</p>
<ul>
<li><em>id</em>: The sequence will be replaced by the video identifier.</li>
<li><em>url</em>: The sequence will be replaced by the video URL.</li>
<li><em>uploader</em>: The sequence will be replaced by the nickname of the person who uploaded the video.</li>
<p>As you may have guessed, the default template is <em>%(id)s.%(ext)s</em>. When some command line options are used, it's replaced by other templates like <em>%(stitle)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s</em>. You can specify your own.</p>
You can configure youtube-dl by placing default arguments (such as <code>--extract-audio --no-mtime</code> to always extract the audio and not copy the mtime) into <code>/etc/youtube-dl.conf</code> and/or <code>~/.local/config/youtube-dl.conf</code>.
