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How to Use yt-dlp: Downloading and Saving YouTube Videos and Audio

An easy-to-understand guide on how to download and save high-quality YouTube videos, or extract and save them as mp3 audio files using the command-line tool 'yt-dlp'. Covers everything from installation to usage.

What is yt-dlp?

yt-dlp is a command-line tool for downloading YouTube videos. Not only can you download videos, but you can also download them as music files in mp3 format.

Download and Install

  1. Download the latest yt-dlp.exe from the yt-dlp releases page.
  2. Place yt-dlp.exe in a folder of your choice.
  3. Add the folder path of yt-dlp.exe to the Path environment variable.

Usage

Run yt-dlp.exe in the command prompt and specify the URL of the YouTube video.

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yt-dlp.exe "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"
  • Passing just the VIDEO_ID part as an argument is also OK.

If you want to download it as an mp3 music file, run the following command.

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yt-dlp.exe --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --add-metadata "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_ID"

The video will be downloaded to the current directory where you executed the command.

That’s it.