The Linux Experiment

Have you ever wanted to save a YouTube video for offline use? Well now it’s super simple to do with the easy to use command line utility youtube-dl.

Start by installing the utility either through your package manager (always the recommended approach) or from the project GitHub page here.

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

This utility comes packed with loads of neat options that I encourage you to read about on the project page but if you just want to quickly grab a video all you need to do is run the command:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/YOUR_REAL_VIDEO_HERE

So for example if you wanted to grab this year’s YouTube Rewind you would just run:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_GuOjXYl5ew

and the video would end up in whatever directory your terminal is currently in. Can’t get much easier than that!

The machine I am running Kubuntu on is primarily used for streaming media like Netflix and Youtube, watching files off of a shared server and downloading media.

I decided to try to install Netflix first since it is something I use quite often. I am engrossed in watching the first season of Orange is the New Black and the last season of The West Wing.

Again, I resorted to Googling exactly what I am looking for and came across this fantastic post.

I opened a Terminal instance in Kubuntu and literally copied and pasted the text from the link above.

After going through these motions, I had a functioning instance of Netflix! Woo hoo.

So I decided to throw on an episode of Orange is the new Black, it loaded perfectly…. without sound.

Well shit! I never even thought to see if my audio driver had been picked up… so I guess I should probably go ahead and fix that.