youtube-dl DASH video and audio in highest quality without human intervention

Question

With youtube-dl I first look what video quality is available and then in second step I download highest possible quality (in this example -f 137+140). Youtube-d

Answer 1

I've found some weird cases where the default (see #5447, #5456) bestvideo+bestaudio/best would download 720p video even when a 1080p was available. The reason that the bitrate on the 720p was very slightly higher, therefore it seemed better quality for youtube-dl. I prefer the higher res, also all other fancy youtube downloader applications downloaded the 1080p (as control).

Therefore I propose and use this:

-f ("bestvideo[width>=1920]"/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best

It will look for the best, at least 1920 wide video. If that's not available, it'll resort to what it would normally choose. The /best part at the end is part of the default config.

On a side note I recommend putting the %(format_id)s somewhere in the filename, so you know what that file is using. If you later want to re-download a bunch of videos without using archive, with --no-overwrites, a better/different quality will form a new filename next to the old one (so you can compare or whatever).

Answer 2

Or you could just use,

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=blabla

This will download the highest quality video and audio and merge them automatically. And I think I have heard somewhere that you need ffmpeg installed to have this automatic behavior. But I bet most systems have it already.

Answer 3

Since the numbers of format are limited I did:

youtube-dl -f 299+140 "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9pzm5b6FFY"
youtube-dl -f 137+140 "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9pzm5b6FFY"
youtube-dl -f best "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9pzm5b6FFY"

If the 299+140 has been downloaded the 137+140 won't be and if none of those have you'll have the best starting with 22. The only problem is that you'll have the best in webm as a duplicate but you can use the ext!=webm to avoid this.

Of course you can start at 313+140 or whatever higher format you want.

Answer 4

Just use -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best for highest resulting quality available.

If you wanted to prefer MP4 format containers instead of WebM, use:

-f bestvideo[ext!=webm]‌​+bestaudio[ext!=webm]‌​/best[ext!=webm].

Answer 5

youtube-dl -f best 'youtube_URL'

or,

youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo+bestaudio/bestvideo+bestaudio' --merge-output-format mp4 'youtube_URL'

or,

youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[ext=webm]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestvideo+bestaudio' --merge-output-format mp4 'youtube_URL'

Hope it helps!