yt-dlp

yt-dlp is a feature-rich command-line audio and video downloader with support for thousands of sites, created as a community fork of youtube-dl. Since its initial release in 2021, yt-dlp has rapidly become the most popular media downloader in the open-source community, effectively superseding the original youtube-dl project which suffered from slow development and missing features. The fork was created to address long-standing issues with youtube-dl, including slow download speeds (especially for throttled YouTube downloads), lack of support for modern YouTube features (Saber, DASH, adaptive formats), outdated extractor code, and slow merge review process. yt-dlp resolves all of these issues while maintaining backward compatibility with youtube-dl command-line options and configuration. Key features include: support for downloading from YouTube, Bilibili, Twitch, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Vimeo, SoundCloud, and over 1,800 other websites (each supported by a dedicated extractor written in Python), parallel fragment downloads for DASH and HLS streams (dramatically improving download speeds for large videos), automatic format selection (intelligently choosing the best available video and audio quality, with options to prefer specific codecs like AV1, VP9, or H.264), support for YouTube Premium content and age-restricted videos (with authentication), playlist downloading with configurable ranges and filtering, subtitle extraction and embedding (downloading and embedding subtitles in multiple languages), metadata embedding (writing video title, description, thumbnail, and chapter information into the downloaded file), post-processing (converting formats, embedding thumbnails, splitting audio, and removing chapters), configurable output file naming templates, a plugin system for extending extractors and post-processors, and configuration files for default options. As of 2026, yt-dlp has over 100,000 stars.