14

I'm downloading an entire YouTube channel consisting of about 10,000 videos. Sometimes the download stops due to errors like "content too short" or "connection interrupted". However, is there a way to automatically restart the download? There is probably a batch file you can make, but I don't know how to make one.

This is the command I use to download:

youtube-dl -f bestvideo+bestaudio ytuser:(Channel) -o "/Videos/lhs/[%(upload_date)s - %(id)s] %(title)s.%(ext)s" --ffmpeg-location %CD%\ffmpeg\bin
karel
  • 13,706

6 Answers6

18

This answer won't work on older versions of youtube-dl. You need to update youtube-dl to the latest version. If you have Python installed on your system, you can install the latest version of youtube-dl locally inside a Python virtual environment, or you can download the latest version of youtube-dl and install it globally.

In Ubuntu 14.04 and later youtube-dl is also a snap package. To install it type:

sudo snap install youtube-dl # launch it with snap run youtube-dl

Open the terminal and type:

youtube-dl -f best -ciw -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" -v <url-of-channel>

...where <url-of-channel> is replaced by the URL of the channel.

Note: If you are downloading a lot of videos, you should change directories to the directory where you want to save the videos before you start downloading them.

Explanation

-f, --format FORMAT
    video format code. The special name "best" will pick the best quality.

-c, --continue

    force resume of partially downloaded files


-i, --ignore-errors

    continue on download errors, for example to skip unavailable videos in a channel


-w, --no-overwrites
    do not overwrite files


-v, --verbose
    print various debugging information
karel
  • 13,706
4

If you look youtube-dl man page you will see option to resume partial downloads. 

-c, --continue
           Resume partially downloaded files.

Man Page Link

Raja G
  • 567
1

Perhaps this argument didn't exist when the question was asked, but using

--ignore-errors

will cause youtube-dl to continue downloading regardless of any errors. Use with caution, since a catch-all solution like this has the potential to cause problems if you miss an important error, although with a channel with 10k videos, you probably don't mind if a handful of them don't download properly.

In addition, using

--download-archive archive.log

will keep track of what's already been downloaded and will skip videos that you've already got, so if the script stops due to something like a power failure, when you run it again it won't try to re-download everything from the beginning.

Nawor3565
  • 11
0

you should use the option "--download-archive". That will skip already downloaded videos from your playlist/channel.

user124764
  • 1
0

A helpful script: youtube_channel_archiver

Motsel
  • 840
0

My suggestion is to use newer, more developed and more supported yt-dlp.

I am scraping channels using command (in .bat file):

yt-dlp -i -f bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 "Put_here_YouTube_Channel_URL" -o "%%(upload_date)s %%(title)s.%%(ext)s"

which gives me best mp4 with best audio and makes file name starting with date of the video.

pbies
  • 3,550