Download Youtube Videos from Linux Terminal

There are so many ways to download YouTube videos. Some methods are easier than others, but the terminal remains one of the simplest ways to download and save a video. You can use your terminal on Linux or Mac to download a video from YouTube with just a few lines of code. Using a third-party tool “youtube-dl” it’s possible to download and store a video directly from the terminal. It’s not as difficult as you might think, and you can do it in just a few minutes.

In this article, we’ll show you how to download YouTube videos from your Linux terminal using several different commands.

Installing Youtube-DL

Use the following command to install a YouTube command-line downloader as per your Linux operating system.

The Recommended Way

To install it right away for all UNIX users (Linux, macOS, etc.), type:

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl 
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl 

If you do not have curl, you can alternatively use a recent wget:

sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl 
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl 

Installing Youtube-dl From Repositories

• On Ubuntu, Debian, and LinuxMint macchine:

  sudo apt update && sudo apt install youtube-dl 
  

• CentOS/RHEL 7/6 and SL

  sudo yum install youtube-dl 
  

• CentOS/RHEL 8, CentOS Stream 9 and Fedora

  sudo dnf install youtube-dl 
  

Once the installed is finished successfully, You can download any YouTube videos directly from the Linux terminal.

Download Audio & Videos with Youtube-dl

Now use the following set of example commands to download Youtube videos with different-2 options and formats as per your requirements.

1. Download Video – Use this command to download videos directly on your system.

   youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McuF7g14hYw 
   

   Output:
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading webpage
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading video info webpage
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Extracting video information
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading DASH manifest
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading DASH manifest
   [download] Destination: How to Download Java Archive using Command Line -McuF7g14hYw.mp4
   [download] 100% of 3.79MiB in 00:09
   

2. Save Videos with Different Name – Use option -o followed by a new video file name to save on your system disk.

   youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McuF7g14hYw -o Video.mp4 
   

   Output:
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading webpage
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading video info webpage
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Extracting video information
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading DASH manifest
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading DASH manifest
   [download] Destination: Video.mp4
   [download] 100% of 3.79MiB in 00:07
   

3. Download Audio in MP3 Only – You can simply download audio of any video on your system in mp3 formats, like following commands.

   youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 https://youtu.be/McuF7g14hYw -o audio.mp3 
   

   Output:
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading webpage
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading video info webpage
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Extracting video information
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading DASH manifest
   [youtube] McuF7g14hYw: Downloading DASH manifest
   [download] Destination: /home/sysadmin/Desktop/audio.mp3
   [download] 100% of 4.16MiB in 00:11
   [ffmpeg] Correcting container in "audio.mp3"
   [ffmpeg] Post-process file audio.mp3 exists, skipping