A few weeks ago, I wrote about a nifty utility called youtube-dl that can be used to download content from YouTube for offline playback (indeed, I’m writing this on the last day of my holidays, having played precisely none of the content I downloaded to watch whilst I was away!).

In the original post, I suggested giving youtube-dl the URL for a playlist to download all videos in the playlist. It’s also smart in that if it detects any videos that are already present in the folder, it will skip them – e.g.:

[download] Cloud Tech 10 – 3rd July 2017 – Azure Machine Learning, Jenkins, Petya detection and more-ymKSGTR55LQ.mp4 has already been downloaded

But what if you want to download lots of videos that are unrelated – or just certain videos from a large list? In my case, I wanted to download a bunch of recent videos from the Global Cycling Network (GCN) – a YouTube channel that I often watch but which has thousands of videos – I certainly didn’t want to download the entire playlist!

Instead, create a file with the download commands for the individual videos, e.g.:

youtube-dl -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5RsFWlvJjOg
youtube-dl -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7FxZ1kFIW0
youtube-dl -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iOaeo3_E8R4

Rather than sitting at the terminal, running each one and waiting, save the file with a .sh extension (assuming a Unix-based OS – like MacOS) and then kick them off at once.

My file was called dl-gcn.sh but it’s no good running that from the Terminal – bash will complain.

bash: dl-gcn.sh: command not found

Instead, prefix with sh as follows:

sh dl-gcn.sh

and the downloads should run through in serial fashion, whilst you get on with something more interesting…