On installing yt-dlp on a linux machine
What is yt-dlp?
yt-dlp allows you to download media from places that do not provide an easy download button. It does this by exfiltrating the media streaming urls--and faking being a logged in browser at times--and stores them locally on a computer. It even integrates with other software to be able to join different video- and audio-streams locally, enabling it to download the highest quality available for each individually.
How can one get yt-dlp?
The recommended way, is to download a pre-packaged binary yt-dlp executable directly from GitHub. This includes most of what is needed in the executable itself and reduces the need for external dependencies to a minumum--though not to zero.
What other stuff does one need to get for yt-dlp?
If one takes the easy method as presented above, the only external dependencies required by yt-dlp are: a Python3 interpreter, a JavaScript interpreter, and FFmpeg. The Python3 interpreter is used to run the yt-dlp source code itself. The JavaScript interpreter is used to deal with modern-day JavaScript challenges on websites. FFmpeg is used to all yt-dlp to download separate video and audio streams, and then recombine them locally--allowing the downloading of highest quality streams independently of each other.1
Python Interpreter via uv
The easiest way to install Python3 on modern systems in a post 2025 landscape is to use Astral's uv utility. While this technically installs a separate application on the computer first, it makes one's life so much easier dealing with the multitude of different Python3 versions, that I cannot emphasize it's usefulness enough. The installation is on a per-user basis and quite simple following their published install script. Once installed, adding a Python3 interpreter to the system is as easy as:
uv python install
This will auto-select a recommended Python3 interpreter, or one can request a particular version by appending it to the command as:
uv python install 3.14
Note: At the time of writing, the Python3.14 interpreter was the newest stable Python3 release. If this is being read in the future, then perhaps a newer version would be more appropriate, as the Python3 version release cycle is rather tight. More information here.
JavaScript Interpreter: Deno
A simple way to think of this is, the same way we need to install Python or Java before we can run programs in these respective language, we must also install a JavaScript interpreter before we can start running JavaScript programs. However, why we cannot simply reuse a JavaScript interpreter that is already bundled together with our browser (assuming you are using a browser from this millenium), is a mystery best left for another day.
To install Deno, we can simply take the command from their website, as:
curl -fsSL https://deno.land/install.sh | sh
This will download a deno executable (and a few other things), and put them into a .deno directory on your home path, which for linux based systems is usually /home/<username>/. Then it will prompt you to add this to the $PATH environmental variable, however, I would recommend doing this manually, so that you actually know where your computer is looking for programs when you ask it to execute something on the command line. For the Fish shell you do this by adding the following line to your ~/.config/fish/config.fish:
fish_add_path --path ~/.deno/bin
Note: Take note of the fact, that we always must add the directory that holds executables to the path, and not the executable itself. This seems like a bit of a security risk, as it would now be possible to simply copy something into this directory to make it accessible for the user everywhere by accident, but at least we still have file permissions that prevent things from automatically being executable...*
FFmpeg -- the work horse of modern media transcoding
Getting into the details of which FFmpeg version, with which licensing, and which components compiled into it to use is outside the scope of this post.2 For now, FFmpeg is an old enough project, that it can be found in most package managers, so it can probably be added by something like brew install ffmpeg or apt install ffmpeg etc.
Quick Intro -- How to use yt-dlp
Usage is comparatively simple. One needs a url for a supported web host--supported web hosts can be listed by the yt-dlp --list-extractors. Once such a url has been obtained, it can simple be plugged into the yt-dlp command as:
yt-dlp -f "bestvideo+bestaudio" "<url>"
Which will then attempt to download the video linked at the url--or even download the entire playlist if a playlist can be identified. Give it a try with a YouTube video.
Footnotes
It is sometimes the case that online streaming service providers will present a higher quality audio stream, when only audio is being streamed than the one which would be found in a media container alongside a video stream.↩
When writing this, I was tempted to try to put all the information about FFmpeg into here as well, however, then I would likely never get around to posting this publically. Instead, if I ever do get around to writing that post, it will be linked
here(but I have not gotten around to writing it yet.)↩