A kinda shitty guide to downloading youtube videos for windows

Hey this is a tutorial on how to download youtube videos without relying on sketchy "youtube to mp3" websites. Yt-dlp is basically superior in everyway, it downloads videos faster and has much more options like changing the format of your video and downloading playlists. The only drawback is that the program used is a terminal dependent program and not alot of people know how to use that. so uhhhh if you dont know how to navigate that kinda shit then i'll try and help you in this tutorial :)

Installation

Disclaimer: This isnt the only way to download yt-dlp, its just the one of the ways that worked for me

So the first thing that you need to do is install a command-line installer. I used scoop so im gonna use scoop in this example here's a link to where you can find out how to download it but for convenience im just gonna tell you the instruction in this page. Open up a powershell terminal (if you have windows, you have powershell) and enter in these commands:

So with this your computer shouldve installed scoop.

The second step is actually downloading YT-DLP This is the github page for it and if you see the installation page then you'll see the instructions on how to download it but again for convenience sake ill just put it on this page:

you also have to download other programs so yt-dlp can actually work like ffmpeg... and something else i cant remember the name... It might be 7zip because thats in my scoop folder but idk i first downloaded this like 4 months ago so my memory is kinda hazy

so uh just just type in:

aaand that should be it! if theres anything other than that you need installing then yt-dlp should tell you when you in the form of an error message when you actually try and download something

Using yt-dlp

soooo you've installed it now how do you use it?

use the powershell terminal and type in "cd" and find the path folder that yt-dl.exe is in. By default scoop shouldve installed it in the scoop\apps folder located in your users folder

now you can actually start downloading shit, there's a list of the commands in the yt-dlp folder titled "commands.txt" or if you can't find it then you can go to the github page or you can type in -h in the powershell terminal but the command basically goes like this:

yt-dlp [insert youtube url here] [insert other commands found in the commands.txt folder]

The -f at the end basically changes the format of the file, if you would have just typed in "yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rG_Ue3t17l0" then the file would come out a .webm

and if you've set it up correctly then you shoudve successfully downloaded a youtube video! the output should be in the same folder.

if you have an error message thats something like "yt-dlp couldnt complete the task becasue you havent installed [insert application here]" then just type in "scoop install [insert application here]" then you should be fine anything other then that then... idk you're on your own. search it up online?

Anyways uhhh good luck