Download Youtube Playlists in Ubuntu

I wanted to download youtube playlists and I decided to use youtube-dl on my Ubuntu instance. I thoguht of writing this article considering that some of the facts I found are useful for you also.

youtube-dl is a command-line program to download videos from YouTube.com and a few more sites. It requires the Python interpreter, version 2.6, 2.7, or 3.2+, and it is not platform specific.

To download a playlist, simply run the following command. Where “playlist_url” is the URL of the playlist that you want to download.

#youtube-dl -cit <playlist_url>

In order to download the playlist, I used the below command.

#youtube-dl -cit 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_7OwE7twvfQ&list=PLPw0KKt6G-I9LjQ58tZon1w-UUdI1gNz0'

Alternatively, you can just use the playlist ID:

#youtube-dl -cit PLPw0KKt6G-I9LjQ58tZon1w-UUdI1gNz0

Some of the useful switches when using youtube-dl to download contents.

-i, --ignore-errors    Continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a playlist
--geo-bypass        Bypass geographic restriction via faking X-Forwarded-For HTTP header (experimental)
--playlist-start NUMBER          Playlist video to start at (default is 1)
--playlist-end NUMBER            Playlist video to end at (default is last)
-r, --limit-rate RATE            Maximum download rate in bytes per second (e.g. 50K or 4.2M)
-R, --retries RETRIES            Number of retries (default is 10), or "infinite".
-f, --format FORMAT              Video format code, see the "FORMAT SELECTION" for all the info
-x, --extract-audio              Convert video files to audio-only files (requires ffmpeg or avconv and ffprobe or avprobe)
--audio-format FORMAT            Specify audio format: "best", "aac", "flac", "mp3", "m4a", "opus", "vorbis", or "wav"; "best" by default; No effect without -x
--audio-quality QUALITY          Specify ffmpeg/avconv audio quality, insert a value between 0 (better) and 9 (worse) for VBR or a specific bitrate like 128K (default 5)


In a shell, & is a special character, advising the shell to start everything up to the & as a process in the background. To avoid this behavior, you can put the URL in quotes.

These days YouTube videos have different resolutions, you first need to check available video formats of a given YouTube video. For that run youtube-dl with “-F” option. It will show you a list of available formats.

#youtube-dl -F <video_url>

Its output will be like:

Setting language
 BlXaGWbFVKY: Downloading video webpage
 BlXaGWbFVKY: Downloading video info webpage
 BlXaGWbFVKY: Extracting video information
Available formats:
37      :       mp4     [1080x1920]
46      :       webm    [1080x1920]
22      :       mp4     [720x1280]
45      :       webm    [720x1280]
35      :       flv     [480x854]
44      :       webm    [480x854]
34      :       flv     [360x640]
18      :       mp4     [360x640]
43      :       webm    [360x640]
5       :       flv     [240x400]
17      :       mp4     [144x176]

Now among the available video formats, choose one that you like. For example, if you want to download it in MP4 version and 1080 pixel, you should use:

#youtube-dl -f 37<video_url>

If you just want to download the audio from a YouTube video, you can use the -x option to simply extract the audio file from the video.

#youtube-dl -x <video_url>

The default file format is Ogg which you may not like. You can specify the file format of the audio file in the following manner:

#youtube-dl -x --audio-format mp3 <video_url>

If you want to update youtube-dl, you can use the below command. However pip should be installed in your Utube instance.

#sudo pip install --upgrade youtube_dl

The above steps will install latest version of youtube-dl that can be checked using youtube-dl --version. As of now the output of youtube-dl --version is:

I hope this article helped you to download YouTube videos on Ubuntu. If you have questions or suggestions, please drop a comment below.