Youtube. The website that needs no introduction. But what may need an introduction is how to download videos from it. There are many ways to do this but this post will be going over the fastest method, though be warned terminals and command prompts lie ahead!

To download the videos we will be using a program called “youtube-dl”. You can download it here for Windows, Mac, Linux, and other *nix systems. (Or you can download it from python-pip or your distro’s packages)

Once you have that installed open up Command Prompt on Winows or Terminal for everything else and type youtube-dl in. It should output this:

Usage: youtube-dl \[OPTIONS] URL \[URL...]

youtube-dl: error: You must provide at least one URL.
Type youtube-dl --help to see a list of all options.

If not, you have installed it wrong, or if you don’t want to install it you need to navigate over to the folder it’s in with the cd <directory> command. But if it does, great I’m sure you can guess what to do next: get the URL of the video and put it in front of youtube-dl. You can also see on the website which other video websites are supported!

Have fun downloading all of some small youtuber’s videos, reposting them and getting a million subscribers!