A simple YouTube video downloader shell script.

This script can run with either dash or bash. Other than the shell, it only requires some very basic UNIX tools, such as, sed, grep, wget, etc.

To download a video from YouTube, simply use the URL as a parameter. For example,

$ sh downtube.sh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

If the given URL is a play list, then all the videos in that list will be downloaded in sequence. For example,

$ sh downtube.sh http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8496A23849C610C1

You can use -f FMTS option specify preferred video formats. For example, if you only want to download 720p, H.264-encoded video, use the following command,

$ sh downtube.sh -f 22 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Please note that not all formats are supported for every video.

Option -n prints out the IDs and titles of the given videos without downloading them. Combining with option -c FILE, which tracks videos that have been downloaded using FILE, you can filter out certain videos by their titles. For example, if you want to download videos from a play list without Rick in the title, you can first print out the play list as follows,

$ sh downtube.sh -n http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8496A23849C610C1 >playlist.txt

Then, pick out videos with Rick in their titles,

$ grep Rick playlist.txt >nodownload.txt

Now, run downtube again telling it that those videos have already been downloaded, so downtube will not download them,

$ sh downtube.sh -c nodownload.txt http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8496A23849C610C1