Backing Up YouTube Content
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Updated on
There are great content on YouTube that I would be sad if it went away. Therefore, I did some digging around and found a great discussion on Reddit on backing up YouTube videos. The solution is based on youtube-dl and I modified the script a little to fit my needs.
The options added to youtube-dl makes it so that meta information such as subtitles, thumbnails, etc get added to the video.
youtube-dl --ignore-errors \
--playlist-reverse \
--output "%(uploader)s/%(uploader)s - %(title)s - %(upload_date)s.%(ext)s" \
--format "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]" \
--merge-output-format mp4 \
--all-subs \
--embed-subs \
--embed-thumbnail \
--add-metadata \
URL_HERE
Audio Only
To extract only audio here’s the modified command
youtube-dl --ignore-errors \
--playlist-reverse \
--output "%(uploader)s/%(uploader)s - %(title)s - %(upload_date)s.%(ext)s" \
--format "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]" \
--merge-output-format mp4 \
--embed-thumbnail \
--add-metadata \
--extract-audio
URL_HERE