How to bulk download videos and rename them simultaneously using youtube-dl?

Question

I am using Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. I want to download some YouTube videos. I came to know about the command line tool youtube-dl from this question. As mentioned by Yasser, using the command,

youtube-dl youtube.com/videolink --format mp4

I am able to download those video files in mp4 format.

Now I want to download ten videos from different channels. I have a text file with the YouTube links and the names by which I want to save them. The text file with name data.txt looks like,

http://youtube.com/link1    name1
http://youtube.com/link2    name2
http://youtube.com/link3    name3 
.........                   ......
.........                   ......
http://youtube.com/link10    name10

Now I want to run the youtube-dl command only once so that it takes the arguments from that text file automatically and save them with the required names.

If I have only the links in data.txt, i.e.,

http://youtube.com/link1
http://youtube.com/link2
http://youtube.com/link3 
.........
.........
http://youtube.com/link10

I am able to download the videos using the command only once with option -a,

youtube-dl --format mp4 -a data.txt

But I could not rename them simultaneously. From man page of youtube-dl I found that there is an option --output to set the filename.

How could I do that?

Answer 1

If you are only renaming files because you don't like the style by which youtube-dl names them, then you can use --output (or -o) with a template to customize the way it names all the files from Youtube metadata.

For example, -o %(title)s.%(ext)s will cause it to leave out the Youtube IDs from all of the filenames.

There are a lot of options, which may depend on your version of youtube-dl, so full details on this can be found at the terminal by typing:

man youtube-dl
/OUTPUT

---

However if you do want to name each file individually, you could instead run youtube-dl once for each line in the text file like this:

(while read URL NAME; do [ "$URL" ] && youtube-dl --format mp4 -o "$NAME" "$URL"; done) < data.txt

For each line, split it at the first run of one or more tabs and spaces into a URL and NAME, then if the line is not blank, pass them to youtube-dl. If the line just has a URL, the file will not be renamed.

Answer 2

Your solution is to use config file. On Linux and OS X, the system wide configuration file is located at /etc/youtube-dl.conf and the user wide configuration file at ~/.config/youtube-dl/config. Note that by default configuration file may not exist so you may need to create it yourself. I did not have any in my ~/.config, so I had to create my configuration file. In there you can pass any argument you'd usually use with inline command in youtube-dl. Good use case is authentication with .netrc file and common use is the output format. Here is sample config file:

#Authentication with .netrc file
--netrc

# Save all videos in a directory named vimeo in your home directory
-o "~/Vimeo/%(title)s %(upload_date)s i%(id)s.%(ext)s"


# Download best format available via direct link over HTTP/HTTPS protocol
-f '(bestvideo+bestaudio/best)[protocol^=http]'

# Simple file name
--restrict-filenames

You can use --ignore-config if you want to disable the configuration file for a particular youtube-dl run. In essence, just like you're using -a switch to batch download, you can use config file to batch rename your downloads and tons of other customizations if you wish. Everything is documented with nice examples at youtube-dl official documentations, specially read the CONFIGURATION & OUTPUT TEMPLATE sections.