yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a community fork of youtube-dl for downloading video and audio from the command line. Forked in April 2020, licensed under the Unlicense public-domain dedication, and written primarily in Python. It covers 1500+ sites for video, audio, subtitles, chapters, and thumbnail downloads, including YouTube, Bilibili, Vimeo, Twitter/X, TikTok, Twitch, VK, SoundCloud, and many more, plus native support for live streams and DASH/HLS segmented formats.

Core capabilities center on a programmable, CLI-driven downloader. Format selection lets users pick by codec, resolution, bitrate, file size, or video/audio split combinations, with automatic merging into a single mkv or mp4 container. Metadata is written into ID3 / Vorbis / MP4 tags automatically (title, uploader, date, chapters, thumbnail), with embedded subtitles, descriptions, and info_json debug snapshots. Post-processing runs an FFmpeg pipeline out of the box: trimming, subtitle muxing, audio extraction, transcode to mp3 / m4a / opus / wav, metadata embedding. Network layer supports cookie and browser-cookie authentication (SponsorBlock, private playlists, age-gated content), proxies, rate limiting, concurrent fragment downloads, and live-stream recording (with synchronized youtube_live_chat scraping). Ecosystem: Python module is importable as a library; community extensions include yt-dlp-ejs (YouTube nChallenge signatures) and yt-dlp-getpot-provider.

Use cases include: open-source video workers archiving sources at scale, researchers analyzing platform data flows offline, media monitoring and preservation, second-content creators collecting reference material, and AI training data preparation (combined with gallery-dl / scrapy). Hardware floor: a CLI tool — single-core CPU and a few MB of RAM are enough; FFmpeg is optional for post-processing. Onboarding: pip install yt-dlp / brew install yt-dlp / grab the release binary, three steps to running.

Licensed under Unlicense (public-domain dedication), free for any use including commercial and closed-source, attribution not required. When the upstream youtube-dl stalled, yt-dlp became the de-facto successor. SponsorBlock integration, chapter extraction, and automatic subtitle embedding are key advantages over the original youtube-dl. Note: yt-dlp is strictly a downloader — for second-content editing, transitions, or generation, combine it with ComfyUI (node-graph workflow) or OpenMontage (end-to-end Agent).