Velvet Star Monitor

Standout celebrity highlights with iconic style.

news

Downloading videos to an external drive with youtube-dl

Writer Matthew Barrera

My Hard drive has very little free space left. Thus I am trying to get youtube-dl to save the videos onto my external drive. With no luck, so far. Has anyone tried that? Or any ideas on how to proceed? I am new to linux and my interactions with the command prompt can be found below.

me@mycomputer:/$ youtube-dl -o 'media/New Volume/Youtube Downloads'
me@mycomputer:/$ youtube-dl -o '/media/New\ Volume/Youtube\ Downloads' 

I thought that would save the videos on the external drive, but instead the things are getting saved in my home folder under ~/media/New Volume/Youtube Downloads. Any help is welcome!

1

4 Answers

How about:

cd '/media/New Volume/Youtube Downloads'
youtube-dl URL1...
youtube-dl URL2...
...
1

All of these work for me when run from /home/vasa1. I don't have to first cd to the target folder (or drive):

  • youtube-dl -o "/media/vasa1/TOSHIBA EXT/%(title)s" (an external USB drive)

  • youtube-dl -o "/media/vasa1/EC82B9BF82B98E98/%(title)s" (an NTFS partition on the internal hard disk)

  • youtube-dl -o "/home/vasa1/Downloads/%(title)s"


    I suggest you run youtube-dl --version and then look for your version here: . When you click on your version from the list, you'll be taken to a page that has a detailed section on usage.
3

This simple function would save "Nyan Cat 10 hours (original).mp4" from YouTube in the Videos folder:

video(){ youtube-dl -o "/Users/daniel/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s" $1 -f mp4
}

Usage from your terminal:

video 

1) create a soft link (symbolic link) to home/USER/ folder

ln -s /media/USER/EXT_DISK ~/home/USER

(USER=user name;EXT_DISK=name of your ext disk)

2) then, youtube-dl -o ~/EXT_DISK/"%(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s" -f 249

Your Answer

Sign up or log in

Sign up using Google Sign up using Facebook Sign up using Email and Password

Post as a guest

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy