This is killing me. Videos that are gigabytes in size instead of a couple hundred mb. I don’t have the storage space for this. I don’t have the bandwidth for this. More and more content creators are using 4k video instead of 1080p. Is there an easy way to make it only download videos in 1080p? I’ve found a few commands around the internet that don’t work, presumably they work on some videos sometimes but that’s just not good enough.
I download videos from a custom made web interface connected to yt-dlp so if it’s no longer going to be possible to automate the process of video and playlist downloading then everything is going to become a huge pain in the ass.
Use yt-dlp -F to list the available formats, and pick the one you want. See the “Video Format Options” section of the man page.
To elaborate a little on this, if the format you want doesn’t have audio you may have to combine two formats. -F lists the formats, -f to choose them. As an example you can choose to combine an audio and video format like this: yt-dlp -f 136+140 [URL]
Guess I’ll have to find a way to get my script to automate that somehow. My goal is to get it back to where the only thing I have to do to download a video is paste the url in a lan webpage on my local server.
You can specify multiple formats and it will download the first one that’s available.
Check the most upvoted answer and then look into tubearchivist which can take your yt-dpl parameters and URLs to download the videos plus process them to have a better index of them.
I don’t remember the format codes but they are generally pretty stable across a given host like youtube. The trouble is that not every video has all of the formats. You might have to just find the nearest one and convert with ffmpeg.