[SOFT] The Quick and Dirty Guide to youtube-dl

tl;dr: We wanted to save ourselves some bandwidth and download YouTube videos we love instead of streaming them constantly. Perfect job for a Raspberry Pi we had lying around.

First off, let's install youtube-dl on a fresh Raspbian install. You might be tempted to use a simple apt-get: don't. It will make it harder to get the latest updates for the software down the road. Instead:

• Download the software - sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
• Get the permission to execute the software on your Pi - sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl
• After it's done, test the software responds correctly - youtube-dl -U

If everything went well, youtube-dl will tell you you have an up-to-date version installed! Now we're ready to download some videos.

Go to the URL of the video you want to download and, in terminal, type youtube-dl [URL]. Videos will download to the directory where you are located in two files - one for best video, one for best audio - before mixing both into an .mkv file.
There are more things you can do to make your life with youtube-dl even better:

• Download a video and format the title to remove amy special characters - youtube-dl --restrict-filename [URL]
• Download all the videos from a playlist and rename each file with the title of the video - youtube-dl --download-archive archive.txt [PlaylistURL]
• Download only the audio track of that mix you dig, or that vlog you can't get enough of - youtube-dl -f 'bestaudio' --restrict-filename [URL]

That's it! Enjoy the YouTube goodness, all local.

Extra resources

• youtube-dl repository on GitHub