A small command-line tool for downloading YouTube videos, built on top of yt-dlp.
Prompts for one or more YouTube URLs and downloads the best available video+audio quality to your local Downloads folder. Type q to quit.
pip install -r requirements.txt
python youtube_downloader.pyThis tool is a thin wrapper around yt-dlp, an actively maintained, open-source video downloader (a fork of the original youtube-dl). All the actual download logic — format selection, extraction, site support — is yt-dlp doing the work. This project just wires it up with a simple CLI loop and a default output location. yt-dlp is released under The Unlicense.
- Only download videos you own, that are in the public domain, that are under a license permitting download (e.g. Creative Commons), or that you otherwise have the rights/permission to download.
- Downloading YouTube videos may conflict with YouTube's Terms of Service unless YouTube itself provides a download option (e.g. YouTube Premium offline) or the uploader has given permission. This tool does not bypass any DRM or paid-content protections.
- This project is intended for personal, educational, and archival use. Don't use it to redistribute copyrighted content you don't have rights to.
The code in this repository is licensed under the MIT License (see LICENSE). It depends on yt-dlp, which is separately licensed under The Unlicense.