Downloading Youtube videos in a text file...?

Question

If you are familiar to Linux, see the following script...

I have a text file with a (list.txt) of Youtube URLs separated by new line... and I use

cat list.txt | youtube-dl -f best 

to download all in the list

This works fine but I want to emulate it on a Windows Batch file..

set /p data=<list.txt
youtube-dl -f best %data%

This works too.. BUT it downloads only the first video on the list.

A Simple solution w.r.t coding would be preferred.

PS:Also it is certain that I'm not looking for solutions using youtube-dl commands

Solution 1

Rather than piping it in, you could use functionality provided by youtube-dl - it has a parameter that allows you to point at a text file containing a list of URLs - one per line.

-a, --batch-file FILE

File containing URLs to download (- for stdin), one URL per line. Lines starting with #, ; or ] are considered as comments and ignored.

In your situation you'd use:

youtube-dl -f best -a list.txt

Solution 2

You can just use youtube-dl -a yourList.txt where yourList is a file containing URL's delimited by linebreaks.

Solution 3

Youtube-dl allow downloading multiple URL at once, so here is a simple solution:

youtube-dl $(cat my-links.txt | xargs)

Comments

[Attie]

Why don't you just use youtube-dl -a list.txt?

[Admin]

@Attie Okay, you may write it as an answer.

[Attie]

What did you mean "not looking for solutions using youtube-dl commands"?

[猫IT]

This seems to me as being the best answer for it uses the original tool to do the same and there is a Windows version too. So basically all you need to do is reformat your command according to the answer provided by Attie and just put it in a folder with a batch script and relevant list file. Then all you'll have to do is edit your list file and run your script. Otherwise, though I don't know it properly, I'd suggest looking on PowerShell side. From what I saw it seems they at last included a lot of nice features and commands.

[lbutlr]

when I try to use a batch-file I always get [youtube] xxxxxx: Downloading webpage ERROR: unable to download video data: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden where xxxxxx is the video in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxx

[Vertisan]

@lbutlr It looks like the video is private.

[lbutlr]

No, as it works fine when I do not try to use a batch file.

[Attie]

This discussion isn't really supposed to be conducted in comments... but, 1) Have you updated youtube-dl?, 2) Can you share the full link so we can try?

[ssi-anik]

if someone is getting 'requested format not available' error, try -f bestvideo+bestaudio flag

[bobpaul]

The subshell is unnecessary. xargs will append whatever it gets on standard input to the end of the commandline. So just do cat my-links.txt | xargs youtube-dl -f best.

[Community]

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[whatspoppin]

thats event better, thanks