Thanks for your reply @CJK. Replying to the original poster now. youtube-dl seems to do the substitution just fine with the single quotes, at least in iTerm using a zsh shell. I followed the suggestions from the man page and thus far it has worked for me. Good point though that this could be a problem if KM has the youtube-dl substitution tokens as KM variables.
Ah, so the youtube-dl program itself will happily handle the tilde expansion ? Or is it zsh that has different rules about what it does or doesn’t expand inside quotes ?
From reading the man page discussion on output templates, youtube-dl does the expansion using python string formatting operations. I think having the template output text in single quotes prevents the shell from doing its own expansion prior to youtube-dl doing its magic. I don't think it matters whether it's a zsh shell or a bash shell.
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Actually, I just entered the same command in a bash shell with the same result.
That's pretty cool.
Hey Norm,
This fails to produce a title for me in the Finder:
youtube-dl -f mp4 'https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmRYgwZOCNA' -o '~/Downloads/YT/%(title)s.%(ext)s'
Playing around with the quotes doesn't make a difference.
Any idea why?
TIA.
-Chris
Can you please clarify? What do you mean fails to produce a title? Does it say couldn't extract title or something?
The title I get in the Finder is:
_.mp4
Full path:
~/Downloads/YT/_.mp4
-Chris
Not really sure. It worked for me.
I downloaded youtube-dl from homebrew. The version info is:
$ brew info youtube-dl
youtube-dl: stable 2019.08.13, HEAD
Download YouTube videos from the command-line
https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/
/usr/local/Cellar/youtube-dl/2019.08.13 (12 files, 2.1MB) *
Built from source on 2019-08-27 at 19:59:08
From: https://github.com/Homebrew/homebrew-core/blob/master/Formula/youtube-dl.rb
==> Options
--HEAD
Install HEAD version
How did you install youtube-dl?
Norm
Can someone help me with this yt-dl command: youtube-dl -f mp4 -o "/Users/me/Downloads" URL
What is wrong with me changing the download folder? The error I get is "unable to open for writing: [Errno 21] Is a directory: "
From this discussion thread, it would appear you need to specify a file path as the output, which cannot be a folder path. You're basically asking it to save the file as ~/Downloads, which, if it were go ahead and do that, would overwrite your entire downloads folder and replace it with a song I can't imagine is so amazing it would be worth the sacrifice.
Hey Norm,
Using MacPorts.
youtube-dl --version
--> 2019.07.16
I see this is a bit older than the Homebrew version.
Okay, I uninstalled the MacPorts exe and installed the HB exe – and this seems to have fixed the problem.
Thanks.
-Chris
Both MacPorts and Homebrew now have v2019.09.01
I confirm that both work correctly on my macOS 10.12.6 (Sierra) system.
-ccs
Glad the updated version worked. Thanks for the update!
Norm
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When executing the youtube-dl command in a terminal it gives you a nice download progress indication that updates until it reaches 100%
[download] 100% of 19.86MiB in 05:10
When I execute the same thing in KM using the Execute Shell Script action, I lose this progress indication and I don't know when the D/L is complete until the KM macro finishes. It would be nice to be able to get some idea that the D/L is happening and that the D/L is not hung. Any idea on how to do this?
Hey Chris,
That's not going to happen any time soon if at all.
Keyboard Maestro's Execute a Shell Script action is a script-runner mechanism and not a terminal that can manage interactive I/O.
If you want a progress indicator then script the Terminal.app with AppleScript.
-Chris
Thanks. I'll check out scripting terminal.
--Chris
Hi All,
YouTube removed my YouTube-DL video from their platform. Is YouTube-DL still working well for everyone?