Very happy you had fun making the little script! One thing that will become important pretty quick if you continue making these scripts is that it’s almost always better to wrap your variables in quotes - so it becomes yt-dlp -x “$a”. It’s okay here but if you ever paste something that has a space in it, this will keep it together ‘as one’.

If you want to expand your knowledge with this, some fruitful paths to go down are the following:

• can you find a way to download multiple urls one after the other if you paste them all at once? (Multiple arguments)
• can you find a way to ask the user for these multiple urls one after the other? (loops)
• and can you find a way to have it ask until you hit enter without a url pasted and only then it starts? (conditionals and test)

The last one is already quite a bit advanced but if you can do that you have enough of the ‘programming’ basics of the shell down to a degree that you can create many little helpers like this with ease.

Of course don’t feel forced to do any of that - if you’re happy with the improvement as-is, that’s all you need to enjoy the fun of Linux!

Stop right now. This will all end in tears. You’ll become a developer and spend the rest of your life fixing bugs. You can still get out.

You'll probably like this youtube channel then :)

https://www.youtube.com/@BreadOnPenguins

You all forgot to add the best yt-dlp option: --sponsorblock-remove all

One of us! One of us!

Hell yeah

Here is a script I wrote:

~/bin 0s  
> cat vget  
#!/usr/bin/env fish  
yt-dlp --embed-metadata --write-subs --embed-subs --write-thumbnail --prefer-free-formats -f "[height<=1080]" $argv  

Guess we're sharing scripts now. I have a script that downloads playlists as MP3s and keep an archive.

#!/usr/bin/env sh

browser_cookies="firefox:1cvnyph7.YouTube TV"

download() {
	url="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=%241"
	dir=$2
	archive_name=$3

	yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail --embed-metadata --cookies-from-browser "$browser_cookies" --download-archive "archives/$archive_name.txt" -P "$dir" -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" "$url"
}

download PLPzniwWWCSjVQteWPqVvyu8SQsrStVYwZ high-quality-rips/ rips
download PLPzniwWWCSjWZj3-DAOh8ZKrsVReP_Ksm good-playlist/ picks

this isn't perfect but i made one when i wanted to fetch a video for a specific resolution (because i prefer 480)

ytgrab() {  
  local id="$1"  
  local res="${2:-480}" # default to 480  
  local url="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=$id"  

  # fetch formats  
  local fmt  
  fmt=$(yt-dlp -F --cookies-from-browser vivaldi "$url")  

  # printing the format output  
  echo "$fmt"  

  # pick video format matching the requested resolution  
  local vfmt  
  vfmt=$(echo "$fmt" | awk -v r="${res}p" '$0 ~ r && /video/ {print $1}' | head -n1)  

  # pick best m4a audio  
  local afmt  
  afmt=$(echo "$fmt" | awk '/m4a/ && /audio/ {print $1}' | head -n1)  

  # safety check  
  if [ -z "$vfmt" ] || [ -z "$afmt" ]; then  
    echo "Could not find matching formats (video ${res}p or m4a audio)."  
    return 1  
  fi  

  echo fetching: yt-dlp -f ${vfmt}+${afmt} --cookies-from-browser vivaldi --write-subs --no-write-auto-subs --sub-lang "en.*" $url  
  yt-dlp -f "${vfmt}+${afmt}" --write-subs --cookies-from-browser vivaldi --no-write-auto-subs --sub-lang "en.*" "$url"  
}  

You've got me beat. I just have a text file with some common usage examples in it.

That's great! Here's a few tips to take it a bit further; the world is your oyster!

Open your .bashrc file (e.g. /home/yourusername/.bashrc) and add the following:

alias get="/path/to/your/bash/file"

Now open a terminal and type get, and it'll launch the script. No clicking needed, it'll run anytime from any terminal!

And if you do use the alias then you can use another refinement, you can drop the echo: instead of $a, you can use $1 and remove the echo & read as you no longer need them:

#! /usr/bin/bash yt-dlp -x $1

Now for example you can type in a terminal:

get http://url.to.video/

And yt-dlp will do it's stuff. $1 passes the first parameter after starting the script as a variable to it.

You can use the keyboard shortcut Control+shift+v to paste a URL into the terminal, no mouse needed; just remember to add a space after typing get

I have a similar scriptlet that I use to open YouTube URLs in mpv, using just and wl-clipboard... I just copy the URL and press my G1 key (it has a keybind of just yt-paste attached) which launches the yt-paste snippet below, reads the url from the clipboard, parses it and passes it to mpv.

# Parse the clipboard for YouTube URLs and open them in mpv
yt-paste:
  #!/usr/bin/env bash
  YOUTUBE_URL_REGEX="^https:\/\/(www\.youtube\.com\/watch\?v=|youtu\.be\/)[a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}"
  YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_URL_REGEX="^https:\/\/(www\.youtube\.com\/playlist\?list=)[a-zA-Z0-9_-]+"
  YOUTUBE_SHORTS_URL_REGEX="^https:\/\/(www\.youtube\.com\/shorts\/)[a-zA-Z0-9_-]{11}"
  # Youtube URL
  if [[ "$(wl-paste)" =~ $YOUTUBE_URL_REGEX ]]; then
    echo "Opening valid YouTube URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Opening YouTube URL"
    mpv "$(wl-paste)"
  # Youtube Playlist URL
  elif [[ "$(wl-paste)" =~ $YOUTUBE_PLAYLIST_URL_REGEX ]]; then
    echo "Opening valid YouTube Playlist URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Opening YouTube Playlist URL"
    mpv "$(wl-paste)"
  # Youtube Short URL
  elif [[ "$(wl-paste)" =~ $YOUTUBE_SHORTS_URL_REGEX ]]; then
    echo "Opening valid YouTube Shorts URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Opening YouTube Shorts URL"
    mpv "$(wl-paste)"
  # No Match
  else
    echo "Clipboard does not contain a valid YouTube URL" >&2
    notify-send --app-name="YT-Paste" --icon=mpv --transient "Whoops!" "Clipboard does not contain a valid YouTube URL"
    exit 1
  fi

No offense, but I'm seeing a lot of useless scripts here. You can simply put these option in yt-dlp.conf and then just run yt-dlp "url".

I self host Pinchflat and have set it up to monitor one of my own yt playlists. Then if I want to download anything on mobile or desktop I just save it to that playlist and it's done.

I love things like this, makes it so easy to learn when it's a really simple to understand and explicit implementation of a high level feature (read input, pass to command)

hell yeah

Nice! I did mine as an alias:

alias yt='yt-dlp --remote-components ejs:github -f "bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4"'

And then just yt [URL] downloads the thing.

this is neat, thanks!

awesome! I never would have thought to make something like that.

You could make it an alias and shorten the number of keystrokes

I prefer keeping my aliases in ~/.bash_aliases, which is sourced in my ~/.bashrc, ie

. ~/.bash_aliases

Then you would just need to source your bashrc to load it the first time.

I simply using local LLM for it