youtube-dl is Dead, Long Live youtube-dl

The popular command-line utility for downloading videos from YouTube and over 300 other websites is now abandonware. Because youtube-dl is open source, however, developers and community members made forks. Additionally, there are other projects providing similar functionality to youtube-dl.

yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a fork of a fork: it’s based on the defunct youtube-dlc. It has many features, but its most salient are:

• Improved format sorting
• Cookie support
• SponsorBlock integration
• YouTube search with ytsearch: and ytsearchdate:
• Partial mitigation against YouTube throttling
• Multiple, concurrent video fragment downloads

To install it, run:

sudo curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -o /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp

MPV

MPV is a lightweight, command-line video player. It integrates with youtube-dl to stream video from all websites that youtube-dl supports. If you use yt-dlp, you must make a symbolic link from the yt-dlp binary to youtube-dl:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Mech

Mech is a Go module that allows for anonymous API access to the following services:

• Bandcamp
• Google Play
• Instagram
• MusicBrainz
• Reddit
• SoundCloud
• Spotify
• Vimeo
• YouTube

You can grab it here