YouTube download websites are terrible, they are full of adverts trying
to get you to buy stupid things, pop ups are everywhere, they are all around
just a headache to have to deal with. Thankfully
yt-dlp and
mpv solve this issue.
mpv is a media
player and it is very extensible and minimal. You can listen to music watch
movies etc etc with mpv but in addition with yt-dlp we can watch videos
straight from the internet without having to watch through the web browser.
yt-dlp allows us to download video/audio content off of the internet. You
may of heard of youtube-dl, yt-dlp is the continuation of youtube-dl. yt-dlp
works on many different site, of the sites I have tried, we can use yt-dlp
on YouTube, Invidious, Dailymotion and BBC Iplayer and I imagine many more.
You will need to download and install both yt-dlp and mpv, both these tools can be found in most if not all package manager repos. You will likely only need to install mpv as yt-dlp is included with mpv.
If all we want to do is download videos to our hard drive off of a
website like YouTube all we need to do is simply run a command like this:
yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZj6cfus2h4
This will download the video straight to the hard drive. If you want to
download a playlist of videos, supplying the link to the playlist will
download all of the videos from the playlist.
NOTE: I have only tried the playlist part with
YouTube and
Invidious so I don't know how it would react
to a site like BBC Iplayer.
In order to download audio only we must supply yt-dlp with some extra
arguments. It is a simple as this:
yt-dlp --extract-audio --audio-format wav https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZj6cfus2h4
Of course replace the audio format with whatever you like for example mp3.
Again we can replace the video link with a playlist link and it will just
download all the videos in the playlist as audio only files, this is very
useful if you want to download massive playlists of all your tunes.
As mpv is a media player and works well with yt-dlp, we can quite easily
watch videos straight from the internet without downloading them to the disk
, it is as simple as this:
mpv https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZj6cfus2h4
This will use yt-dlp to get the video and feed it to mpv. We can replace
the link with a playlist or any video/audio file on your computer.