A simple YouTube video downloader shell script.
This script can run with either dash or bash. Other than the shell, it only requires some very basic UNIX tools, such as, sed, grep, wget, etc.
To download a video from YouTube, simply use the URL as a parameter. For example,
$ sh downtube.sh http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
If the given URL is a play list, then all the videos in that list will be downloaded in sequence. For example,
$ sh downtube.sh http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8496A23849C610C1
You can use -f FMTS option specify preferred video formats. For
example, if you only want to download 720p, H.264-encoded video, use
the following command,
$ sh downtube.sh -f 22 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
Please note that not all formats are supported for every video.
Option -n prints out the IDs and titles of the given videos without
downloading them. Combining with option -c FILE, which tracks
videos that have been downloaded using FILE, you can filter out
certain videos by their titles. For example, if you want to download
videos from a play list without Rick in the title, you can first
print out the play list as follows,
$ sh downtube.sh -n http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8496A23849C610C1 >playlist.txt
Then, pick out videos with Rick in their titles,
$ grep Rick playlist.txt >nodownload.txt
Now, run downtube again telling it that those videos have already been downloaded, so downtube will not download them,
$ sh downtube.sh -c nodownload.txt http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL8496A23849C610C1