Download YouTube Videos With youtube-dl On Ubuntu 9.04

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Author: Falko Timme <ft [at] falkotimme [dot] com>
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Last edited 09/15/2009

youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com. It allows you to save videos as .flv files. This short article shows how to install and use it on Ubuntu 9.04.

I do not issue any guarantee that this will work for you!

1 Installing youtube-dl

youtube-dl is available as an Ubuntu package, so we can open a terminal and install it as follows:

sudo aptitude install youtube-dl

2 youtube-dl Usage

To learn about youtube-dl's usage, take a look at its man page:

man youtube-dl

Basically it works as follows:

youtube-dl -o [name of output file] [YouTube URL]

E.g.:

youtube-dl -o test.flv http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mIZvDD0RkQ

would save the video from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mIZvDD0RkQ as test.flv in the current directory.

To watch the downloaded video, browse to its location in the File Browser and double-click the file:

The Movie Player will open and start the playback of the video. (If required plugins are missing, you will be guided through their installation before the playback starts.)

3 Links

• youtube-dl: http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/wiki/Home
• Ubuntu: http://www.ubuntu.com/