How to Install YouTube-dl on Mac.
youtube-dl is an open source command line tool that lets you download videos from YouTube (and many other video sites). It is often considered better than paid video download programs. In our previous article, we saw how to use youtube-dl to download video to Android terminal. Even Windows has a YouTube GUI client, macOS doesn’t have such resources. So, in this article we will show you how to install youtube dl on Mac. Let’s start.
Read: 5 Best Ways to Password Protect Folders on Mac
Install youtube-dl
1. To install youtube-dl, you must first install Wget. And in order to install Wget, you need to install homebrew first. So, copy and paste the following command into your Mac’s terminal (press cmd + space and type terminal). After you run the following command, your Mac will download the Homebrew master file from Github. You may need to enter your Mac password multiple times. The whole process will take 10-15 minutes depending on your internet speed. ruby ​​-e "$ (curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"
2. Once you’ve downloaded Homebrew, you’re ready to install Wget. Enter the following command and also enable OpenSSL for TLS support. brew install wget --with-libressl
3. Now that we have a Wget to download packages from the Internet, we will use it to download and install the Youtube-dl package. Enter the following command and hit enter. sudo wget https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O / usr / local / bin / youtube-dl
4. Now you have successfully installed youtube-dl on your Mac, but it doesn’t work yet. To check, you can type youtube-dl in your terminal and this will result in a permission error. To fix this, you need to grant the required permissions, type the following command and press Enter. sudo chmod a + rx / usr / local / bin / youtube-dl
5. That’s it, you should now be able to download YouTube videos (or any videos from sites that support youtube-dl) by simply typing youtube-dl [video-link]. For example, to download one of my YouTube videos, I type the following command.
youtube-dl https://youtu.be/LxTcvc4cgCY
6. You can find the downloaded video in your home folder on your Mac. To bring up your home folder, simply go to Finder Go Home or press the keyboard shortcut CMD + Shift + H.
Must Read: 10 Free MacOS Apps That Will Improve Your Productivity
Download 1080p video with FFmpeg
By default, FFmpeg loads the second highest resolution. You may need to install FFmpeg to get the highest quality video. Without FFmpeg, you will most likely end up with second place, which in our case was 720p. To install FFmpeg, enter the following command. brew install youtube-dl ffmpeg
Also read: 5 ways to transfer files from Mac to Mac
Packaging
So, this is how you use youtube-dl to download videos using your terminal. The app works exactly as advertised, but few people know about it. Anyway, if you want to change the download location or download the video in a different resolution, you can check the youtube-dl command line options on Github.