How To Download An Entire YouTube Channel

10/23/2019 How to Download an Entire YouTube Channel - Let's WP
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TUTORIALS
 20 min
Firsh
How to Download an Entire YouTube Channel

 Last updated on July 28, 2019  Archival, CLI
  
This detailed guide takes you to the realm of command line tools on Windows. Fear not, I’ll be
with you along the way and teach you the youtube-dl utility from scratch. I believe it’s the best
way to download an entire Youtube channel, mainly because of its reliability and robustness. It’s
not some scammy ad-supported bloatware YouTube downloader many people use for single
videos and playlists. On the contrary, this is an advanced tool, but I try to do my best to bring the
di culty down to an intermediate level. Expect baby steps and the usual storytelling instead of
slapping you with a line of code and leaving you in the lurch!
Table of Contents
Why would you archive YouTube?
Annoying tidbits of the platform
For a better binge-watching experience
The echo chamber
How did I get into this?
Setting up youtube-dl on Windows 10
The recommended options of youtube-dl
Before you begin downloading
Download an entire YouTube channel with this youtube-dl command
Formulate the download job as a batch le
https://letswp.io/download-entire-youtube-channel/ 1/20
Saving the settings to a con g le

Do you need just a single video?
Download a complete YouTube playlist
What if you want audio only?
Music playlist variant
Keep your archive in sync with automation
Using the Task Scheduler
Run everything with one task
Keep youtube-dl up-to-date
Download the les
What to do with your archive and how to play it
Why would you archive YouTube?

Surely you can’t download the whole thing. However, there are countless technical reasons to get
your tiny part of it!
Annoying tidbits of the platform
It’s possible to overcome every single annoyance the YouTube platform imposes on us, by
decoupling downloading from viewing. This way you have complete control over the experience.
Why is that a good thing?
First of all, there are no ads whatsoever. While the browser extension uBlock Origin  does
a fantastic job at ensuring that I don’t encounter any ads on desktop, ever, the same cannot
be said about my mobile experience. Adguard  for Android is excellent, though it can’t
quite block the YouTube ads.
You see no comments or other distracting elements.
Your archive is portable. Take it to a place with limited or no internet. You might not want to
exhaust mobile data plans while commuting but would bene t from watching a quality
channel.
O ine performance means no buffering. Skip boring parts and seek instantly.
Language learning a cionados could download and watch videos with dual subtitles. Yes,
that means both languages shown on the screen at the same time, one at the top, one at
the bottom – PotPlayer can do this. For example, this video  has both Spanish and
English subs that are not auto-generated.
Retain videos forever. Some content gets deleted from time to time. There is no guarantee
speci c channels or videos will exist 5, 10, 20 years from now! Therefore, the data
hoarder  mentality dictates you should archive what you like.
Is the space on the video control bar really so scarce that the volume bar needs to hide
itself? It’s one of my pet peeves with Google’s new design trends tuck away the functional,
often-used buttons and sacri ce them on the altar of minimal material design.
For a better binge-watching experience
What if I want to watch every video of a channel? It’s unrealistic to expect that I’ll begin every
session by in nite scrolling the videos tab for minutes to nd where I left it… Even then, how will
I know that the next video in the queue is the real next one, and not some “recommended for you”
nonsense unless they are all in a playlist?
Furthermore, the watched and progress indicators are hit-and-miss at best. So many times
YouTube often forgets that I’ve already watched a video. The feature that would let you
continue where you left off doesn’t seem to remember long gone sessions. If the videos are
o ine, I guarantee that you and your video player will do a better job at tracking seen videos.
You wouldn’t cherry-pick just a handful of episodes from serial drama television series, would
you? I’ve found that I began to like some content creators so much, that I want to see ALL of
their content, in order, without even looking at the title! For me, the best way to do that is to
download each YouTube channel I love. I’ll tell you about some of these binge-worthy channels
later.
The echo chamber
YouTube and Facebook (and others) employ specialized algorithms to guess what YOU might
like , and therefore not every content from your subscriptions or friends reaches you. And that
is an understatement. They use machine learning (AI), freaking TensorFlow neural networks to
analyze your habits – this is a bit disturbing if you ask me.
For content creators, this is discouraging since they reach smaller and smaller slice of their
audience and sometimes have to resort to paid promotion to target their fan base. As a content
consumer, if you rely on automatic recommendations, you get stuck in an echo chamber that
keeps re ecting what you like and leaves little to no room for exploration. When you download a
YouTube channel, every single video the content creator ever made is there, without biases. If you
discover a great channel a bit late, you can still go back in time and re-live their videos
sequentially.
How did I get into this?

It was almost a decade ago that my YouTube content consumer role manifested. YouTube was
very different back then.
One of my rst subscriptions was to a pineapple-haired, energetic

gentleman with an unlimited wardrobe reviewing viral videos in front
of a comic book wall.
Back then, if you typed just the letter r into YouTube search, his name, ray william
johnson  would come up as the rst result. Since then, my taste shifted, and I watch and
download channels featuring more sophisticated intellectual content.
The quality and production value increased immensely over the past decade. Due to this, many
education or entertainment channels often beat regular TV programming. Surely the format is
different, and the videos are shorter. However, they carry tremendous value, which is offered for
free.
These are all excellent YouTube channels to binge:
Veritasium  of Derek Muller
SmarterEveryDay  of Destin Sandlin
Nicole Cotroneo Jolly’s TRUE FOOD TV 
Engineering Explained  by Jason Fenske
ElectroBOOM  of Mehdi Sadaghda
ATHLEAN-X™  of Jeff Cavaliere
Colin Furze , the crazy inventor
The earliest time I decided to download a whole YouTube channel was when I rst went skiing. I
wanted to augment the teachings of my coach with a virtual one. So I took the channel of Ski
School by Elate Media  with me on the trip. To illustrate my point, I didn’t have an unlimited
data plan, and even if I did, it would have been slow to watch the ski lessons. The experience
opened my eyes to making content from channels more convenient to follow. I look forwardto
bringing some of my favorite channels with me the next time I y long haul, as in- ight
entertainment is usually subpar.
Setting up youtube-dl on Windows 10

If you are like how I used to be, the installation  part of the docs is Chinese. It runs in the geek
family that command line tools are installed… you guessed it: from the command line! That steep
learning curve prevents the average Joe from using an otherwise ne and easy solution to
download a YouTube channel. That’s why I want to tell you step by step how to set it up. You’ll
see that there is nothing to install in the traditional sense.
First, download these:
The primary tool, youtube-dl  (choose the Windows exe link)
FFmpeg  for combining video with audio with the best quality
Then perform these actions:
1 Create a folder for these tools and your downloads, for example, C:\YouTube
2 Move youtube-dl.exe there
3 Extract the FFmpeg archive and also move the bin\ffmpeg.exe and bin\ffprobe.exe les
into the C:\YouTube folder
The last time I taught you how to download an entire website with wget, and again we need to
add another tool to the environment variables. It’ll ensure system-wide availability of the
youtube-dl command and everything else we add to the YouTube folder later.
1 "C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe" sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables CLI
1 Hit Windows + R , paste the above line and hit Enter
2 Under the User variables double-click the Path row
3 Click New and add the path of that folder, such as C:\YouTube
4 Click OK, OK to close everything
5 Verify it works by hitting Windows + R again and pasting cmd /k youtube-dl – it should
not say ‘youtube-dl’ is not recognized
The recommended options of youtube-dl

As usual, I’ve read the readme  le so you don’t necessarily have to. Based on my experience,
these are useful to download an individual YouTube channel.
-format
1 -format ("bestvideo[width>=1920]"/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best CLI
The format parameter is the heart of this whole guide. The combination will rst look for the
best video at or above full HD width, and only resort to the next best formats if the desired
quality is not available. I’ve been recommending this quality setting on Reddit and StackOver ow,
after nding that by default, youtube-dl prefers a lower resolution video just because it has a
higher bitrate than the larger resolution version. However, it’s not a bug, as con rmed  by the
developer. Regarding audio, I was not so picky. Finally, the default /best at the end is just there for
videos where video and audio don’t exist separately.
--download-archive archive.txt
Use this to avoid re-downloading already grabbed content. Each successful download gets
noted in the le so youtube-dl will skip them the next time. This setting is essential if you want to
update your archive periodically. The archive le will reside in your YouTube folder and will serve
as a log or history for every download you perform, on any channel.
-output
1 --output %(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s.%(title)s.%(id)s.%(ext)s CLI
Speaking from experience, I can say that it’s helpful to save the output like this. Else it’s just
chaos. The above means that:
Videos are placed in folders named after their channel.
File names start with the date of the videos.
The video title is included (without special characters, see the next option).
YouTube video ID is there so I can quickly nd it online if I want to comment or leave a

rating.
An extension such as .mkv is mandatory.
You can format  the saved video’s lename however you want.
--restrict-filenames
This should be common sense because foreign letters in the video titles can con ict with the
allowed characters on the system.
--merge-output-format mkv
Most often, video and audio streams will arrive separately, so it’s only logical you get to decide
the output container. FFmpeg will create this, and Matroska  (.mkv) seems like a good choice.
--ignore-errors
Let’s make things unstoppable! It’s especially useful when you set out to download a huge
YouTube channel and leave your computer on for the night. You don’t want to wake up seeing
that it stopped early 😢 because of some silly error, such as this bummer:
1 Downloading video 296 of 335

2 [youtube] FJnbLzOh--c: Downloading webpage
3 [youtube] FJnbLzOh--c: Downloading video info webpage
4 ERROR: This video contains content from SME, who has blocked it in your country on
copyright grounds.
--no-playlist
It’s very easy to accidentally use a link that refers to a playlist in addition to the single video you
chose. I use this in the single video download script, to prevent unintentionally downloading an
entire playlist.
--write-sub
Instruct the tool to write subtitle les next to the videos.
--embed-subs
If instead, you want to embed subtitles in the video itself, this is the switch to use.
--sub-lang es,en
If you want subtitles, this is how you specify the language. This is for Spanish and English, if
available.
Before you begin downloading

You need some disk space when you download a long-standing YouTube channel. One hour of
video time is somewhere between 500MB and 1GB of le size. Many channels have hundreds or
thousands of videos. I know these are rookie numbers, but to give you an idea:
Download speeds aren’t super fast either. Sometimes they are a crawl, I’m not sure why. Perhaps
the speed is optimized for streaming at the pace of viewing. It all depends on the content and
how popular it is. I presume that YouTube duplicates trending videos across multiple servers.
Download an entire YouTube channel with this youtube-dl

command
You’d typically need to run the command in the folder where you want to download the desired
YouTube channel. While you could open a command prompt and navigate there manually, I have
a better idea. Since you probably want to update the archive later when new videos come, why
not save the command to a batch le?
Formulate the download job as a batch file

Create a new le in Notepad or a text editor, and place the below snippet in it. Save it as
something like job-colinfurze.bat in the C:\YouTube folder, next to youtube-dl. All that’s left is
to run it!
1 cd /D "%~dp0" CLI
2 youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/user/colinfurze --format
("bestvideo[width>=1920]"/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best --download-archive archive.txt --
output %%(uploader)s/%%(upload_date)s.%%(title)s.%%(id)s.%%(ext)s --restrict-filenames --
merge-output-format mkv --ignore-errors
3 PAUSE
Substitute the channel URL for your target channel.
It has my recommended settings from the previous section.
The double percent signs are for escaping in a batch le. When calling the command
directly, you need only a single percent sign.
The rst line ensures the videos will be downloaded in the folder of the batch le when it is
run as a scheduled task. You’ll see this in every snippet here.
The PAUSE part helps it remain open once nished so you can assess what happened.
Otherwise, it instantly closes. When scheduled, it doesn’t cause any harm.
You can either double click the batch le, or just enter its name (in this example
job-colinfurze ) in the Run dialog ( Windows + R ). Get a taste of how easy this is to use
after the guided setup!
You’ll learn in the next section how to reuse the con guration if you want to download more
than one YouTube channel.
Saving the settings to a config file

If you feel that this isn’t going to be a one time endeavor for you, it’s worth preparing a con g le
for future (re)use. These are the core settings which should apply every time, whether you
download a channel, a playlist, or a single video from YouTube. We can still overwrite these when
needed. Add the following to a le called config.txt and put it in the C:\YouTube folder, next to
youtube-dl.
1 --format ("bestvideo[width>=1920]"/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best CLI

2 --download-archive archive.txt
3 --output %(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s.%(title)s.%(id)s.%(ext)s
4 --restrict-filenames
5 --merge-output-format mkv
6 --ignore-errors
By having this, you don’t need to remember to use these options and your command becomes
shorter in the batch le. For example, in the job-EngineeringExplained.bat this would be:
1 cd /D "%~dp0" CLI
2 youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/user/EngineeringExplained --config-location config.txt
PAUSE
3
See? Much nicer! Use this snippet as a template to create a batch le for every YouTube channel
you want to download. Then you can run these jobs individually or even schedule them (see
later).
Do you need just a single video?

It’s the icing on the cake that this tool works with over a thousand  sites! Seriously, try it! It’s the
gift tool that keeps on giving. Maybe not to archive entire accounts from lesser-known platforms,
but it’s fabulous for downloading single videos! The point is that the tool gures out the actual
URL to the video le. You don’t need to care about it, just use the link you’d share with a friend.
This is where a little setup and using a con g le will pay off. You’ll see the ^ character in the
examples from now on. In case you are wondering, that tells the batch le that new lines are still
part of the same command. Create a new text le called dl-single.bat in your C:\YouTube
folder with the following content:
1 @echo off CLI

2 cd /D "%~dp0"
3 setlocal enableDelayedExpansion
4 set /p video="Paste the video link to download: "
5 youtube-dl ^
6 --config-location config.txt ^
7 --output SingleDownloads/%%(upload_date)s.%%(title)s.%%(id)s.%%(ext)s ^
8 --no-playlist ^
!video!
9
PAUSE
10
With that out of the way, anytime you want to download a single video from just about any site,
you’d:
1 Hit Windows + R
2 Write dl-single (or it’ll be there from last time) and press Enter
3 Paste the video link to download and hit Enter again
Find single video downloads in the C:\YouTube\SingleDownloads folder.
Download a complete YouTube playlist

The solution is not much different from single videos. The youtube-dl tool excels at batch
downloading, but it isn’t just to download a YouTube channel. One important thing to note is that
the setup from config.txt puts each video in a folder that represents its uploader’s channel. So
if you download a YouTube playlist of 100 videos – each from a different owner – that’s going to
have a detrimental impact on your neatly organized YouTube folder. Therefore, I advise using the
playlist creator and playlist name as the folder instead of the channel in the output option. If you
want this, then create a text le in C:\YouTube , call it dl-playlist.bat and add the following to
it:
1 @echo off CLI

2 cd /D "%~dp0"
4 set /p video="Paste the playlist link to download: "
5 youtube-dl ^
7 --output %%(playlist_uploader)s-%%(playlist_title)s/%%(upload_date)s.%%(title)s.%%
(id)s.%%(ext)s ^
!video!
8
PAUSE
9
From now on, whenever you want to download a YouTube playlist, just:
1 Hit Windows + R
2 Write dl-playlist and press Enter – it might already be there as a recent command if
you press Down
3 Paste the playlist link to download and hit Enter again
You’ll nd playlists this way: C:\YouTube\Veritasium-Misconceptions .
What if you want audio only?

We’ve all used YouTube as a music player at some point. Unless you are interested in the music
video, sometimes it doesn’t make sense to save the video stream when you just want to hear the
content. Except when you download Romy Wave , even if you just listen to / watch her in the
background… Music, mixes, podcasts, you name it, this part helps you get an o ine version for
yourself.
Inside C:\YouTube folder, create the dl-music.bat le with the following snippet. It downloads
or extracts the audio track of one single music video at a time, and places it in a Music
subfolder.
1 @echo off CLI

2 cd /D "%~dp0"
4 set /p video="Paste the music video link to download: "
5 youtube-dl ^
7 --output Music/%%(title)s.%%(id)s.%%(ext)s ^
8 --format bestaudio/best ^
--extract-audio ^
9
--no-playlist ^
10
!video!
11
PAUSE
12
Music playlist variant
The options differ for music playlists. Each playlist will have its own folder inside Music. Save it
as dl-mplaylist.bat after pasting this into it:
1 @echo off CLI

2 cd /D "%~dp0"
4 set /p video="Paste the music playlist link to download: "
5 youtube-dl ^
--output Music/%%(playlist_uploader)s-%%(playlist_title)s/%%(title)s.%%(id)s.%%(ext)s ^
7
--format bestaudio/best ^
--extract-audio ^
8
!video!
9
PAUSE
10
Usage (I’m sure you’re getting pro cient at this by now):
1 Hit Windows + R
2 Write dl-music or dl-mplaylist for singles and playlists, respectively, and press Enter
3 Paste the link to download and hit Enter again
Don’t be alarmed that you’ll likely get no mp3 les because the new trend is a codec called
Opus . A decent music player like foobar2000  will have no problem with this new format. It’s
not the scope of this article to help transcode anything into to mp3, not that you should.
Keep your archive in sync with automation

Up until writing this article, I resorted to running the YouTube channel download jobs manually
every now and then. It’s because I wasn’t on the edge of my seat for new videos. There are a
couple of things you need to know before you blindly schedule these jobs.
It’s a relatively network-intensive task, so schedule it outside the hours you’re conferencing
or need the bandwidth or low latency.
If the process is interrupted, it’ll continue without any problems the next time. It’ll even
resume a half- nished download!
You need to decide how much delay you tolerate based on the number of channels, their
average update frequency, and your watching habits. The more often you run it, the less it
has to download at once. Fortunately, a job runs silently in the background, so an annoying
command prompt popup is out of the question.
Using the Task Scheduler
The batch les for downloading a channel are in a way that they work with both manual and
automatic start. This part of the guide assumes they already work for you, the initial run is
complete, and every video from said channels have been downloaded. Therefore, you are only
waiting for new videos.
1 Search for and open Task Scheduler in the Start Menu
2 On the right-hand side, click Create Basic Task…
3 Name it something meaningful, such as YouTube downloads
4 Set up the Trigger (timing) however it’s most suitable for you
5 As an Action, choose Start a Program
6 Browse for a job’s .bat le, such as the C:\YouTube\EngineeringExplained.bat , and click
Open
7 At Finish, tick the Open the Properties dialog
8 Once there, inside Security options, switch to Run whether user is logged on or
not. Oddly, this will ensure the job runs hidden from view.
9 When you click OK, you need to provide your Windows password. If you don’t have one,
you might need to create one. It doesn’t have to make you miserable if you like the no-
password login. It’s possible to skip the Windows 10 login screen  ( Windows + R and
netplwiz ) even if you have a password.
Run everything with one task
If you don’t want individual control when automating your jobs, the following script bundles
them. Therefore, one scheduled task is enough. Call it all-youtube-jobs.bat and put it into
the C:\YouTube folder, right where the jobs live. Make sure that the lename of each individual
job for a YouTube channel you wish to automatically download has the job- pre x. That’s how
this task will nd them.
1 cd /D "%~dp0" CLI
2 for %%x in (job-*.bat) do (
3 @echo Calling %%x...
4 @echo | call %%x
5 )
Keep youtube-dl up-to-date

The command that updates the exe, with no questions asked is this:
1 youtube-dl -U CLI
While you can run that manually anytime from a command prompt ( Windows + R , and run cmd
), perhaps it’s worth setting up a scheduled task. You can follow the previous instructions, as
they are similar. One caveat: for the Action > Start a program, specify the full path like
this: C:\YouTube\youtube-dl.exe and for Arguments add -U and that’s it.
1 Microsoft Windows [Version 10.0.17134.345]

2 (c) 2018 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
3
4 c:\YouTube>youtube-dl -U
5 Updating to version 2018.11.18 ...
6 Waiting for file handle to be closed ...
7
8 c:\YouTube>Updated youtube-dl to version 2018.11.18.
Download the files

For your convenience, you can download the ZIP of the folder I created for this article (without
any videos or .exe les). This is what it looks like:
These are the batch les that include the custom code, and the con g le, but you still need to:
Get the software, as we aren’t redistributing them. Without those, the batch les won’t
download anything from a YouTube channel.
Change the job-* les to download what you want, as they are just examples. Remember,
one of them uses the con g le, the other has the full command.
 DOWNLOAD
What to do with your archive and how to play it
Now that you have o ine YouTube videos, you might want a remarkable video player. After all,
we strive to improve upon the YouTube experience. A prime candidate for this task on the
desktop is PotPlayer  (free!). It can open every video in the same folder together as a playlist.
Also, it’s very well con gurable (think about mouse and keyboard shortcuts) and looks beautiful
at the same time, thanks to skins. A serious video watcher will appreciate the exibility. This is
PotPlayer with the Kardox skin  playing Jeff Cavaliere’s channel (just about my everyday
activity):
On the other hand, I recommend VLC  only for Android, as it’s too industrial/raw for me on the
desktop.
So, there you have it! Now you know how to download a YouTube channel, with all the content
you want. Are you ready to binge? I hope I didn’t open a can of worms… Because it’ll require even
more of your time to watch it all, now that you know how much of it is out there. As you might
imagine, it was challenging to write this article because of the plethora of distractions from
YouTube itself.
What channels are YOU downloading? Share it in the comments!
Like Share One person likes this. Sign Up to see what your friends like.
https://letswp.io/download-entire-youtube-channel/
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Firsh
I’m the frontend developer of Granth team's secret project. Justified Image Grid, a top-selling
gallery plugin gifted me six years of WordPress expertise and troubleshooting skills. I like to hone
my abilities in time and project management. You'd find me reading and writing while chilling in
my hammock.
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10/23/2019 How to Download an Entire YouTube Channel - Let's WP

Saving the settings to a con g le

Why would you archive YouTube?

Annoying tidbits of the platform

You see no comments or other distracting elements.

For a better binge-watching experience

The echo chamber

How did I get into this?

One of my rst subscriptions was to a pineapple-haired, energetic

These are all excellent YouTube channels to binge:

Veritasium  of Derek Muller

SmarterEveryDay  of Destin Sandlin

Nicole Cotroneo Jolly’s TRUE FOOD TV 

Engineering Explained  by Jason Fenske

ElectroBOOM  of Mehdi Sadaghda

ATHLEAN-X™  of Jeff Cavaliere

Colin Furze , the crazy inventor

Setting up youtube-dl on Windows 10

First, download these:

The primary tool, youtube-dl  (choose the Windows exe link)

Then perform these actions:

2 Move youtube-dl.exe there

1 "C:\Windows\system32\rundll32.exe" sysdm.cpl,EditEnvironmentVariables CLI

1 Hit Windows + R , paste the above line and hit Enter

2 Under the User variables double-click the Path row

4 Click OK, OK to close everything

The recommended options of youtube-dl

1 -format ("bestvideo[width>=1920]"/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best CLI

1 --output %(uploader)s/%(upload_date)s.%(title)s.%(id)s.%(ext)s CLI

Videos are placed in folders named after their channel.

File names start with the date of the videos.

YouTube video ID is there so I can quickly nd it online if I want to comment or leave a

An extension such as .mkv is mandatory.

1 Downloading video 296 of 335

Instruct the tool to write subtitle les next to the videos.

Before you begin downloading

Download an entire YouTube channel with this youtube-dl

Formulate the download job as a batch file

Substitute the channel URL for your target channel.

It has my recommended settings from the previous section.

Saving the settings to a config file

1 --format ("bestvideo[width>=1920]"/bestvideo)+bestaudio/best CLI

Do you need just a single video?

1 @echo off CLI

3 Paste the video link to download and hit Enter again

Find single video downloads in the C:\YouTube\SingleDownloads folder.

Download a complete YouTube playlist

1 @echo off CLI

3 Paste the playlist link to download and hit Enter again

You’ll nd playlists this way: C:\YouTube\Veritasium-Misconceptions .

What if you want audio only?

1 @echo off CLI

Music playlist variant

1 @echo off CLI

Usage (I’m sure you’re getting pro cient at this by now):

3 Paste the link to download and hit Enter again

Keep your archive in sync with automation

Using the Task Scheduler

1 Search for and open Task Scheduler in the Start Menu

2 On the right-hand side, click Create Basic Task…

3 Name it something meaningful, such as YouTube downloads

5 As an Action, choose Start a Program