Downloading from Youtube for offline watching
27 Aug 2013Call me old fashioned but I do not really like the "always connected" motto that the industry is following right now. I like to have physical music and video files on my hard drive, so I can access them anywhere, anytime, without relying on me being connected to a network.
And yes, I get the irony of talking about physical _files._
Anyway, I now download movies directly from Youtube, Dailymotion, Vimeo and consorts, copy them to my smartphone, and watch them in the train, waiting queues or bed.
To achieve that, here are the command-line tools I'm using. First is youtube- dl, and as its name does not imply at all, it can download from more than Youtube. The second one is vimeo_downloader which is specialised in downloading from Vimeo. And the last one is the more generic getflashvideos that can download from a variety of smaller websites.
All those scripts accepts the video url as parameter.
Happy scripting and happy viewing !
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