How to install yt-dlp on Windows, Mac, and Linux

I'm sure a lot of people on Lemmy can figure out package managers, but I wanted to try writing a guide more aimed at beginners that can be shared with people trying to figure out yt-dlp. I only found one other guide like this outside of random Reddit threads and comments, and it was pretty long and technical.

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I'm a bit critical about teaching how a certain application is installed on Linux. Especially because this is aiming towards beginners who may not be familiar with how software is installed and managed on Linux. And in such a case, just providing the command for one certain type of package manager could be harmful, because all other common systems are left out.

If Python3 is not installed on your distribution, then I would not blindly recommend people to install it (if its available). Because changing the systems Python can cause serious issues. There is a reason why its not installed, if its not. I would recommend to install yt-dlp from your distributions package manager, if its maintained and always up to date. In example it is in the Arch repositories and can be installed with pacman -S yt-dlp and is always up to date. In that case you don't need to install or change Python or Pip and do not need to configure your PATH anymore. It's painless. And it gets automatically updated with your system.

yt-dlp offers lot of functionality other than simply downloding, but its complicated in my opinion. Shamelessly I want to recommend into looking my own Bash script on Linux, to make the commandline usage of yt-dlp easier: https://github.com/thingsiplay/yt-dlp-lemon

In Windows I use the tartube gui for yt-dlp which works fine for me.

This is de wey. Chocolatey also helps install all sorts of other useful stuff, like cURL, FFMPEG, NodeJS, and other things that might not have binary releases or installers available for them.

On Android, from FDroid you can install an app called Seal, which is a minimal frontend for yt-dlp. I discovered it while trying to circumvent issues Newpipe was having with some update to the YouTube API.

Unlike Newpipe forks, which can use the sponsor block API but not when downloading the video directly to your device, Seal allows you to input the custom flags available from the yt-dlp cli, so you can automatically skip annoying sponsor mentions even on your downloaded videos.

Why not use JDownloader?