Updated 2024-10-11: I updated the link to point to the repo where it’s being maintained. Notice: The current version assumes you have an account logged into YouTube through the Firefox browser, because recent blocking attempts has made downloading videos more difficult.
YouTube’s been forcing creators to censor their works more and more, and often times after a successful publish of said content. More history and valuable information is being lost every day because a corporation controls the largest source of video content freely available.
At the same time, I’ve been running commands using yt-dlp over and over again for my own purposes, aside from this censorship. The syntax is relatively easy to forget despite being very clearly defined, so I finally made a script to handle it for me.
It’s in Lua because that’s what I prefer to use, and available on GitHub. Because it is based on yt-dlp, it works for any website supported by yt-dlp. Here’s how to use it:
Usage:
./video-dl.lua [action] <url>
[action]: What is desired.
video (default): Highest quality video (maximum 720p).
backup, clone, copy: English subtitles (including automatic subtitles), thumbnail, description, highest quality video (maximum 720p).
music, audio: Highest quality audio only.
metadata, meta: English subtitles (including automatic subtitles), thumbnail, description.
<url>: Source. YouTube URL expected, but should work with anything yt-dlp works with.Information wants to be free. Help it.