-Copyright © 2006-2012 Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez
youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6+ (Python 3 support is planned), and it is not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like. The project is currently being developed at github.
+youtube-dl is a small command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+, and it is not platform specific. It should work in your Unix box, in Windows or in Mac OS X. It is released to the public domain, which means you can modify it, redistribute it or use it however you like. The project is currently being developed at github.
In Windows, once you have installed the Python interpreter, save the program with the .py extension and put it somewhere in the PATH. Try to follow the guide to install youtube-dl under Windows.
+In Windows save the exe version somewhere (in your PATH if you want to run it simply as youtube-dl) and run it from the command line.
In Unix, download it, give it execution permission and copy it to one of the PATH directories (typically, /usr/local/bin).
-After that, you should be able to call it from the command line as youtube-dl or youtube-dl.py. I will use youtube-dl in the following examples. Usage instructions are easy. Use youtube-dl followed by a video URL or identifier. Example: youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobar". The video will be saved to the file foobar.flv in that example. As YouTube.com videos are usually in Flash Video format, their extension should be flv. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of ffmpeg can play them. That includes VLC, MPlayer, etc. Those two work under Windows and other platforms, but you could also get a specific FLV player of your taste.
+To update, simply call youtube-dl -U, we recommend to do it often.
-If you try to run the program and you receive an error message containing the keyword SyntaxError near the end, it means your Python interpreter is too old or from the 3.x branch.
+After that, you should be able to call it from the command line as youtube-dl. I will use youtube-dl in the following examples. Usage instructions are easy. Use youtube-dl followed by a video URL or identifier. Example: youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foobar". The video will be saved to the file foobar.flv in that example. As YouTube.com videos are usually in Flash Video format, their extension should be flv. In Linux and other unices, video players using a recent version of ffmpeg can play them. That includes VLC, MPlayer, etc. Those two work under Windows and other platforms, but you could also get a specific FLV player of your taste.
+ +If you try to run the program and you receive an error message containing the keyword SyntaxError near the end, it means your Python interpreter is too old, remember that youtube-dl need Python version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.3+.
| youtube-dl | -Running it under Windows | -
We now provide an experimental Windows build. Simply download it here, copy it to a location of your choosing, and run it in the command line.
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