yt-dlp

Overview

Download and extract media from YouTube and 1000+ other sites using yt-dlp — the actively maintained fork of youtube-dl. This skill covers audio extraction (MP3/FLAC/WAV), video download with quality selection, playlist handling, subtitle download, metadata extraction, thumbnail embedding, batch operations, channel archiving, and integration with processing pipelines (ffmpeg, whisper).

Instructions

Step 1: Installation

# pip (needs Python 3.10+); the [default] extra adds the YouTube JS helper, curl-cffi and other optional parts
pip install -U "yt-dlp[default]"

# or pipx / Homebrew
pipx install "yt-dlp[default]"
brew install yt-dlp