You can however skip the merging if you use a media player like PotPlayer which picks up external audio automatically so long as the two files have the same filename and are in the same folder. In the case of YouTube you may therefore end up getting two separate download URLs for the video and audio files.Īs such you’ll need to merge the files manually with FFmpeg or a join them with a muxer like MKVToolNix.

In the above command, youtube-dl will by default fetch the link for the best available formats i.e the highest quality. To do that, just right-click anywhere on the title bar then select Properties and go to Options > Edit options.ģ. TIP: On Windows, make sure the Quick Edit Mode is enabled so that it’s easy to copy and paste links from the command prompt window. One clear advantage of going this route is that it not accelerates your downloads but also gives you control of the video and audio formats to download unlike other video downloaders which only provide a handful of preset formats.

This will be the subject of this tutorial. The second option is to use youtube-dl to generate the download links then use your preferred download manager to download the media files.

Of these you’ll find two types: youtube-dl frontends like Persepolis or the numerous commercial / freeware options that exist. The first one is to use a download manager that supports downloading steaming videos. There are a couple of ways to get around these limitations. Likewise, while it’s possible to resume interrupted downloads with it, this is only ideal for single downloads. Compared to dedicated download managers, Youtube-dl is not only comparatively slower but also doesn’t support multiple concurrent downloads. Nevertheless, downloading is not youtube-dl’s strongest point.

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