Ubuntu Download youtube videos as mp3

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Hello,

In my last post I highlighted how you can download youtube videos using a great tool called youtube-dl

In this post we will be covering a few things.

1. Downloading youtube videos and later converting them to mp3
2. Downloading videos directly as mp3

We will be making use of ffmpeg and youtube-dl for our case.

Lets go

Preperation

Just so that you know that you will need to install youtube-dl first on your Ubuntu box. If you haven’t read my previous article please read that from here

http://jaspreetchahal.org/ubuntu-12-04-download-youtube-videos-using-youtube-dl/

You will also need to install ffmpeg. You can install it using the command below

sudo apt-get install ffmpeg x264 libav-tools libvpx-dev libx264-dev

Downloading video from youtube and converting them to mp3 using ffmpeg

Lets download a video from youtube now. Considering that you are in /home/user/videos directory and you have write permissions to this folder, run this command

# youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-2MmguSO4w"

Your video will now be stored under /home/user/videos as C-2MmguSO4w.mp4

You can also specify a file name when using youtube-dl as shown below

# youtube-dl -o myvideo.mp4 "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-2MmguSO4w"

Depending on your download speed it can take a while to download this video.

Just in case if you got error saying “Unable to download” then you would like to read my previous post.

Now we have C-2MmguSO4w.mp4 to work with. Lets convert it to mp3

The command

# ffmpeg -i C-2MmguSO4w.mp4 -f mp3 -ab 192000 -vn C-2MmguSO4w.mp4.mp3

The above command will convert our mp4 file to a mp3

-ab 192000 in above command means that our mp3 should be encoded at 192Kbps for great quality
-vn means that do not include video
-i means input file name

To know more about ffmpeg command read more here

http://linux.die.net/man/1/ffmpeg

Downloading videos as mp3 using youtube-dl

Now that we have seen how to mix ffmpeg and youtube-dl together to convert to desired format. We can do pretty much the same stuff with youtube-dl by itself.

Allow me to show you how this is done

Use this command

# youtube-dl --extract-audio --audio-format=mp3 "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-2MmguSO4w"

And that’s it your video will be downloaded as mp3 now.

I hope that this helps. If you found any error in any of the commands above please let me know as I am also riding on a learning curve and it will be great help if you can offer any improvement to whatever I came up with above.

Cheers