How to download YouTube videos using YT-DLP and a-Shell on the iPad
📱iPadOnly,🔗Shortcuts
A few years back I wrote a tutorial how to download videos to the iPad using youtube-dl and a-Shell app but it stopped working because of a court order. Luckily there’s a fork of this called YT-DLP which you can use again. Here’s how it works:
- Step 1. Get the a-Shell app
- Step 2. Get the YT-DLP Python program
- Step 3. Get my YouTube-dl Shortcut for iOS/Mac
- Start using a-Shell with YouTube DLP to download video or audio from the Internet
- When downloading copyrighted audio or video from the web is OK?
- Bonus and reminder: How to watch YouTube without distractions? Use my YouTube Watcher!
Step 1. Get the a-Shell app
Download the app from the App Store. It’s a shell app with python interpreter built in.
Step 2. Get the YT-DLP Python program
Just download the latest realease and save in on your iOS device in Files app in:
On my iPad / a-Shell
If you want to update the script to the latest version, just remove this file, get the latest one and move it to the above folder. You can always check your current version using the command: yt-dlp -U
Alternatively in the a-Shell app just paste this:
curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -o yt-dlp
And it will use the curl command to automatically download the latest version and overwrite it in the Files app in your a-Shell folder.
Step 3. Get my YouTube-dl Shortcut for iOS/Mac
I’ve created this handy Shortcut, so when you find a video which you want to get, you can share it to this Shortcut and it will ask you if you want to download Video or Audio of this video. Later it will just paste a command to your Clipboard and launch the a-Shell app so you just paste it with CMD+V and hit Enter to download it.
If you don’t want to use my Shortcut here are the example commands.
Video
To download a YouTube video like me explaining how you can set up Nozbe in less than 5 minutes you’d have to write:
yt-dlp -f mp4 “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvTR6LcjazU” -o “Nozbe-5min.mp4”
Audio
To download an audio file only of a YouTube clip, like if you wanted to listen to one of my latest #NoOffice podcast episodes about dealing with email, you could subscribe to the podcast or download the latest audio from YouTube like this:
yt-dlp -f m4a “https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aIU6ZPpan4” -o “NoOffice-48.m4a”
Start using a-Shell with YouTube DLP to download video or audio from the Internet
Just write the commands and the video or audio tracks will be saved on your iOS device in the a-Shell folder (not iCloud, but local “on your device”). From there you can move it to any other folder depending on what you’re going to be doing with it.
When downloading copyrighted audio or video from the web is OK?
I don’t do all this to pirate content. What I do with it all falls under fair use and is totally legal.
I download video clips I want to watch offline when I’m on the plane. Or some videos I just want to have available locally for future reference. Sometimes I want to get a clip of a video for my own team productivity videos and it’s not illegal to use a short clip as a reference, b-roll or quotation.
I download audio clips to listen to them in my favorite podcast editor, Overcast. Very often people post long-form videos that are basically them talking, like conference speeches and the video part doesn’t matter to me.
I also download music from YouTube like that. Most official videos are on YouTube so I can download audio from them and use it in my private videos which I edit for the family. Especially the ones where I fly the drone. I don’t post these videos on the Internet anywhere, so this falls into fair/private use. I wish I could just use clips from Apple Music directly in my videos but I can’t. For official Nozbe videos we use licensed content, of course.
It’s still a cat and mouse game with YouTube. Sometimes I got 403 errors when downloading something and needed to update my yt-dlp script to overcome them. So this method is not guaranteed to work. I know some people will use this for piracy reasons, but I think many more, like me, will use it for real fair/private use and will find it very useful.
Bonus and reminder: How to watch YouTube without distractions? Use my YouTube Watcher!
I’ve set up this special page together with a dedicated Shortcut for iOS and Mac so if you want to watch a YouTube clip without being tracked, profiled and with picture-in-picture support on the iPad, get the Shortcut and use my small YT site. I’ve heard from people that they find it useful.