Download videos for free from your own terminal

The program which i use to download videos is the ” youtube-dl “

youtube-dl is a light weight command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com, and many other sites.

In this post i will explain how to:
Install the program on a Linux machine(Ubuntu).
Use youtube-dl to download videos.
[ We can also download playlist from YouTube.com very easily using youtube-dl , we can also customize the way we want to download the playlist i.e, download entire playlist or start downloading the playlist from a certain video etc and selecting the quality of video. Actually we can do a lot with it :). I will brief about them in the later part of the post.]

I will be writing with respect to Ubuntu 14.04, you can easily convert these steps according to your operating system.

INSTALLING   youtube-dl   PROGRAM ( on linux machine):

Fire up the terminal(ctrl+alt+t) and enter the following commands one by one.
[P.S: You will need root access.]

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

That’s it you have installed the program using the terminal.

UPDATING youtube-dl:

You can update the program anytime by using the following command.
$ youtube-dl -U

To Download:

use the following syntax:
$ youtube-dl url

Tweaking youtube-dl:

List all the available formats to download:
syntax: $youtube-dl –list-formats url

To select that format:
syntax: $youtube-dl -f number url

To download list of videos from a file:
syntax: $youtube-dl -a file
Eg: $youtube-dl -a links.txt

To download a playlist from youtube:
syntax: $youtube-dl url

From nth video:
Syntax: $youtube-dl –playlist-start number url

For more info:
$youtube-dl –help

and refer man pages for more tweaks.