Downloading videos to an external drive with youtube-dl
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!
14 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 runyoutube-dl --versionand 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.
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