Friday, April 29, 2022

So Long.... Youtube-DL

 A couple of years ago, I decided to write a quick script called ytdl, short for 'youtube downloader'.  I wrote it as a wrapper for the youtube-dl application, as I was tired of always trying to remember the options that I used when downloading either a video or a song (in audio format only) from youtube. 

Recently, I revisited the application as I needed to grab a couple of things off of youtube, and found that when running it, the downloads were CRAZY slow!  By CRAZY slow, I mean in the area of only getting between 25k and 50k max as a download speed.  I was looking at 1-2 hours to download each of the videos I was wanting to grab.  Considering in the past it would only have taken me a few minutes to download the videos I wanted (in total), I decided to use my Google Foo and see what was up. 

Sure enough, it appears that:

1. youtube.com was throttling the youtube-dl application.  This was confirmed by the plethora of complaints from the community that uses(used) it.  

2. I discovered that youtube-dl was no longer being maintained, and that the last version (from december of last year), was the final version. 

Well, that's not good.  But, what is good, is that there was a replacement...... yt-dlp!!!  Excellent, a successor.  So, I proceeded to download yt-dlp and incorporate it into my script, utterly replacing the old, useless youtube-dl.  

After some tweaking to get the downloaded files the way I like them, I can happily say that I am now seeing download speeds in the megabytes!!!  (7-13Mb, just on the dl's I did today).  

So, I have updated all the download types in the script and pushed up a new version.  If you haven't played with it, please feel free to give it a go.  And, if you have any download sites that you'd like added to the script (that are supported by it), please feel free to open an issue for an improvement.

Here is a link to my ytdl project.  Enjoy!

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