youtube-dl: A starting point

Time for a classic that’s been around for a long time: youtube-dl.

If you kick the wayback machine a couple of times you might get redirected to some of the earliest pages for youtube-dl, which is pushing five years old now, I suppose.

Using it is easy as pie: Pass the URL to youtube-dl on the command line, hold your breath, and if the gods smile upon you, youtube-dl will pluck the file from the ether and deposit it on your local system.

I make it sound less clever than it is. Truth is, I can remember youtube-dl as one of the earliest programs (along with things like htop or mc) that proved to me that some applications are better suited for the console.

So yes, there’s not much to celebrate in a one-line text-based download manager targeted at one specific host. It’s a starting point, you see … for many things. …