The modern web excels at streaming but fails at saving.

Buffering, geo-blocks, and vanished videos frustrate viewers. yt-dlp offers a solution—seamlessly download with a simple command, putting control and convenience back in your hands.

Standard download

The journey begins simply. You have a video you want. This command is your universal starting point.

yt-dlp <url>

It's elegant. It fetches the highest sensible quality from YouTube (and a thousand other sites) and delivers it to you. Think of it as the "open sesame" of your new archive.

Download as audio in WAV/MP3 format

Often, the video is secondary. You want the audio—for a sample, a podcast, or a music file. yt-dlp handles this with surgical precision. Want pristine, uncompressed audio?

yt-dlp <url> -x --audio-format "wav"

Or, for the universal workhorse format that plays anywhere?

yt-dlp <url> -x --audio-format "mp3"

The -x flag (for extract) is the magic word, telling the downloader to discard the video and give you the soul of the file.

List all available file formats of video

Don't just grab blindly. Sometimes you need to see the menu. This command lists every format a video offers.

yt-dlp -F <url>

You'll get a table of codes, extensions, and resolutions. Armed with this intel, you can make a specific choice. See a perfect 1080p MP4 with the ID 301? Download that specific format:

yt-dlp -f 301 <url>

Download batch

The true power of a command line tool is automation. Have a list of URLs in a file called music.txt? Download them all in one go.

yt-dlp -a ./music.txt

And naturally, you can batch-convert them all to audio in one graceful line.

yt-dlp -a ./music.txt --extract-audio --audio-format mp3

Download with minimum download rate

Need to throttle your download speed? Impose a limit.

yt-dlp --throttled-rate 100K <url>

Downloading a fragile playlist? Add retries and pauses to be gentle and reliable.

yt-dlp --retries 10 --sleep-interval 5 <playlist_url>

Download the best MP4, or next best available format.

For the connoisseur, format selection is an art. This command is a masterpiece of logic: it seeks the best MP4 video, or defaults to the best overall.

yt-dlp -f "bv*[ext=mp4]+ba[ext=m4a]/b[ext=mp4] / bv*+ba/b" <url>

Download a specific range of a YouTube video

Even more precisely, you can download just a segment of a file—perfect for clipping a scene or a song sample—with perfectly synced audio.

yt-dlp --download-sections "*00:00:52.0-00:00:58.0" <url> -o "clip.mp4"