You-Get: Open-Source Video Downloader, Supports Almost All Video Platforms

Today, the tool I’m going to introduce is You-Get. It is a simple yet powerful command-line tool designed for downloading videos, audio, images, and even content that you can’t typically see in your browser from various websites.

Why use You-Get?

You may wonder, there are plenty of download tools available, so why use this one? Actually, the biggest feature of You-Get is its “simplicity” and “freedom”.

With You-Get, you are not restricted by platforms and can directly download the content you want without annoying ads or JavaScript interference. For people like us who prefer to have full control over the content on our computers, this is a real blessing.

The advantages of this tool don’t stop there. It supports downloading videos and audio from popular websites like YouTube, Bilibili, Instagram, and SoundCloud, and even extracting image resources, ensuring you can quickly and easily save whatever content you want.

Installing You-Get

To use You-Get to download resources, you first need to install it. The installation is simple, and you can install it directly using pip:

$ pip install you-get

If you’re a Zsh user, you can also install it using Antigen:

antigen bundle soimort/you-get

Alternatively, you can download the source code from GitHub and install it:

$ git clone https://github.com/soimort/you-get.git
$ cd you-get
$ python setup.py install

How to Use You-Get to Download Videos

Let’s assume you find an interesting video on YouTube and want to save it. All you need to do is copy the video’s URL and run the following command:

$ you-get 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw'

You will see an output like this:

site:                 YouTube
title:                Me at the zoo
stream:
    - itag:           43
      container:      webm
      quality:        medium
      size:           0.5 MiB (564215 bytes)
    # download-with: you-get --itag=43 [URL]

Here, You-Get lists the available video formats and qualities for download. By default, it will automatically choose the best quality to download. You just need to wait for the download to finish.

If you have specific format requirements, you can use the --itag parameter to select a different format. For example, to download the video in MP4 format, you can do this:

$ you-get --itag=18 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw'

You-Get also supports downloading subtitles from YouTube (if available) and saving them in a .srt file.

Advanced Usage: Downloading Other Types of Content

In addition to videos, You-Get can also help you download various other types of resources. If you have a direct URL for an image or audio, you can use You-Get to download it. For example, to download an image:

$ you-get https://stallman.org/rms.jpg

The output will look like this:

Site:       stallman.org
Title:      rms
Type:       JPEG Image (image/jpeg)
Size:       0.06 MiB (66482 Bytes)

Downloading rms.jpg ...
 100% (  0.1/  0.1MB) ├████████████████████████████████████████┤[1/1]  127 kB/s

Of course, if you don’t have a direct link but want to scrape media resources from a webpage, You-Get can automatically detect and download resources from the page. For example, to download an image from Tumblr:

$ you-get https://kopasas.tumblr.com/post/69361932517

Proxy Settings and Network Issues

If you’re using You-Get in certain regions or network environments, you might encounter access restrictions. Fortunately, You-Get allows you to set an HTTP proxy to bypass these restrictions. You can specify the proxy address using the -x parameter:

$ you-get -x 127.0.0.1:8087 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw'

If you frequently encounter network issues while downloading, you can use the --no-proxy option to disable the proxy settings.

Streaming Video Playback

In addition to downloading videos, You-Get also supports streaming videos directly to your media player. For example, if you want to watch a YouTube video directly in VLC, you can run the following command:

$ you-get -p vlc 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw'

No need to open a browser and you can completely avoid annoying ads and pop-ups.

Batch Downloading and Automation

If you have multiple videos or files to download, You-Get also supports batch downloading. You can automate the process using a script. For example, the following script can help you batch-download videos from a file containing multiple video links:

#!/bin/bash
for url in $(cat video_links.txt); do
    you-get $url
done

This will save you the hassle of downloading files one by one and significantly improve efficiency.

Compatibility and Supported Websites

You-Get supports many popular media websites, not just YouTube. Here are some supported sites:

With this tool, you can almost download any publicly available multimedia content from websites.