yt-dlp: Why Do Those Videos You Liked Vanish?

Solves in a sentence: Afraid your favorite videos might get deleted someday? yt-dlp can download them locally for permanent保存.

“Watch Later” usually means never watching. Worse, some great videos might disappear one day — deleted, taken down, or made private.

yt-dlp is a video download tool, but it essentially solves the problem of digital content preservation.

What is yt-dlp?

yt-dlp is an actively maintained fork of youtube-dl, supporting video and audio downloads from hundreds of websites. If you can play it in a browser, yt-dlp can probably download it.

The problem it solves: Save online videos locally, watch offline, keep permanently.

Supported Major Sites

• YouTube (up to 8K, supports subtitles, annotations)
• Bilibili / Douyin / Weibo / WeChat Video
• Twitter/X / Instagram / Facebook
• Niconico / other global video platforms
• And many more sites

Download and Installation

Install via Scoop (Recommended for Windows users)

scoop install yt-dlp

Install via Chocolatey

choco install yt-dlp

Direct Download

• GitHub Releases: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases
• Download yt-dlp.exe directly

Tip: It’s recommended to also install FFmpeg for merging video and audio streams after download. Install via scoop install ffmpeg.

Common Commands

# Download single video (best quality)
yt-dlp "video URL"

# Download playlist
yt-dlp "playlist URL"

# Download audio only (MP3)
yt-dlp -x --audio-format mp3 "video URL"

# Specify quality
yt-dlp -f "bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio" "video URL"

# Download Bilibili video
yt-dlp "Bilibili video URL"

Quick Start

1. Install yt-dlp and FFmpeg
2. Open terminal
3. Type yt-dlp "the video URL you want to download"
4. Wait for download to complete

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