For those who don't know, youtube-dl is a free, open source, command line downloader written using Python programming language. Using Youtube-dl program, we can easily download YouTube videos. Not only YouTube videos, we can also download videos from other popular websites such as Dailymotion, Vimeo, BBC, Bloomberg, CNN, ESPN, FOX News, and many more. The complete list of supported websites are given in this link. Youtube-dl is platform independent, so it will work on almost all modern operating systems including Linux, Microsoft Windows, and Mac OS X. In this tutorial, we will see how to install youtube-dl and how to download YouTube videos with subtitle or without subtitle.
Table of Contents
Install youtube-dl on Linux and Unix
Installing youtube-dl is fairly easy.
First download the youtube-dl script using curl or wget as shown below.
$ sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
Or,
$ sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
After downloading youtube-dl program, run the following command to install it.
$ sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
Youtube-dl downloader has been installed now. Let us go ahead and see how to download videos.
Download Youtube videos with subtitles
Let us download the following YouTube video with automatically generated subtitle files.
To do so, run the following command. Replace the URL with your own.
$ youtube-dl --write-auto-sub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smjfGmCn7x0
Sample output:
[youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Downloading webpage [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Downloading video info webpage [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Extracting video information [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Looking for automatic captions [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Downloading MPD manifest [info] Writing video subtitles to: Dr Wayne Dyer - Improve Your Life Using The Wisdom Of The Age-2hsWBXsNHnQ.en.vtt [download] Destination: Dr Wayne Dyer - Improve Your Life Using The Wisdom Of The Age-2hsWBXsNHnQ.f242.webm [download] 11.9% of 119.06MiB at 214.24KiB/s ETA 08:21
To download the videos with actual sub-titles uploaded by the owner, run:
$ youtube-dl --write-srt --sub-lang en https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smjfGmCn7x0
If you the video has subtitles, it be downloaded along with its sub-titles. Else, the following error message will appear.
Sample output:
[youtube] smjfGmCn7x0: Downloading webpage [youtube] smjfGmCn7x0: Downloading video info webpage WARNING: video doesn't have subtitles [download] Destination: Memories - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's speech at European Union-smjfGmCn7x0.f244.webm [download] 100% of 3.18MiB in 00:02 [download] Destination: Memories - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's speech at European Union-smjfGmCn7x0.f251.webm [download] 100% of 1.12MiB in 00:01 [ffmpeg] Merging formats into "Memories - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's speech at European Union-smjfGmCn7x0.webm" Deleting original file Memories - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's speech at European Union-smjfGmCn7x0.f244.webm (pass -k to keep) Deleting original file Memories - Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam's speech at European Union-smjfGmCn7x0.f251.webm (pass -k to keep)
As you see in the above output, the command displays that there is no subtitle files for the specific video.
Now, play the downloaded video to verify whether the subtitle has been downloaded or not.
Great! As you see in the above video, the subtitle has been downloaded.
Download Youtube videos without subtitles
To download any video without sub-titles, just mention the URL without any options like below.
$ youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hsWBXsNHnQ
Sample output:
[youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Downloading webpage [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Downloading video info webpage [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Extracting video information [youtube] 2hsWBXsNHnQ: Downloading MPD manifest [download] Destination: Dr Wayne Dyer - Improve Your Life Using The Wisdom Of The Age-2hsWBXsNHnQ.f242.webm [download] 2.6% of 119.06MiB at 260.88KiB/s ETA 07:35
The above command will immediately start downloading the specified video file in the best available format.
Recommended read:
- Youtube-dl Tutorial With Examples For Beginners
- ClipGrab – A Free, multi-platform YouTube Downloader and Converter
For more details about youtube-dl command, check the man pages.
$ man youtube-dl
Reference links:
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4 comments
This is excellent. Thank You !!
It would be great to embed the subtitles into the video instead of a separate .vtt file though. Would you kindly include that ability into this article.
Thanks Again.
You may combine the separate .vtt subtitle file and .mp4 video file into a single video file.
1) Download the video in mp4
2) Use ffmpeg to combine the downloaded mp4 and vtt files into a single video
Using this article’s example:
1) youtube-dl –format mp4 –write-auto-sub https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=smjfGmCn7x0
2) ffmpeg -i Memories\ -\ Dr.\ APJ\ Abdul\ \ Kalam\’s\ speech\ at\ European\ Union-smjfGmCn7x0.mp4 -i Memories\ -\ Dr.\ APJ\ Abdul\ \ Kalam\’s\ speech\ at\ European\ Union-smjfGmCn7x0.en.vtt -c:s mov_text -c:v copy -c:a copy ‘video with embedded subtitles.mp4’
Thanks for the tip. I will check and update the guide accordingly.
Thanks. Is there a way to download only the subtitles as a .txt file using YouTube dl?