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Paul
Asked: 2021-12-17 07:26:22 +0800 CST

youtube-dl appears dead - what can I use to download videos?

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Judging by the huge number of unresolved issues plus zero activity or communication from the project maintainers, the youtube-dl project appears to be dead and many of the project's contributors have moved on.

When I use the latest version youtube-dl, I only get a 75 KB/sec download rate, which can take many hours to download a video, and it doesn't support a site that I recently started using.

I'm not interested in hosting local git repositories, compiling code, modifying python files or commands.

What alternatives are there to youtube-dl that are relatively easy to install and are actively supported?

A recent versionupdate to the project by the project's maintainer includes a commit for the resignation of the maintainer which is further evidence that project is abandoned and therefore most likely dead.

youtube-dl

2 Answers

  1. The yt-dlp project seems to be what many youtube-dl users and contributors have migrated to.

    Since yt-dlp is ultimately a fork of youtube-dl, it is largely a drop-in replacement. For YouTube downloads, it will download at the same rates as youtube-dl, but it also includes many upgrades, including support for many new websites to download videos from.

    The project supports using pip to install:

    python3 -m pip install -U yt-dlp

    This same command is also used when updating yt-dlp.

    Basic options and command line usage for yt-dlp are nearly identical to youtube-dl, but more advanced options have changed so reading the project's main GitHub page is recommended.

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  2. youtube-dl is back as the official webpage claims. I usually use brew to keep my sanity intact while switching back and forth between Mac and Linux. Just installed it on Ubuntu 20.04 brew install youtube-dl It is working. Happy downloading. Cheers!! youtube-dl working

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