yt-dlp

What This Skill Does

The yt-dlp skill empowers your OpenClaw agent to act as a sophisticated media archivist. It leverages the powerful yt-dlp command-line tool, a fork of the popular youtube-dl, to download videos, audio, and entire playlists from YouTube and a vast array of other websites. This skill is designed to capture media in the highest available quality, automatically merging separate video and audio streams when necessary. It also supports embedding metadata, thumbnails, and subtitles directly into the downloaded files, ensuring your media library is rich with information. For restricted or premium content, the skill can utilize browser cookies to authenticate and download content that would otherwise be inaccessible.

Installation

To install the yt-dlp skill, ensure you have the core dependencies, yt-dlp and ffmpeg, installed and available in your system's PATH. You can typically install yt-dlp using pip (pip install yt-dlp) or your system's package manager. ffmpeg is essential for yt-dlp's advanced features like format conversion and stream merging. Once the dependencies are met, you can install the skill itself using the ClawHub command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/1999azzar/yt-dlp.

Use Cases

This skill is ideal for users who need to archive online video and audio content for offline viewing, personal backups, or further processing. It's perfect for creating local copies of educational lectures, music videos, documentaries, or any other media found online. The ability to extract audio as MP3 makes it useful for creating personal music libraries or podcast archives. For content creators or researchers, it can help archive specific videos or channels for reference. The cookie support is particularly valuable for accessing content that requires a login, such as member-only videos or age-restricted content, though it should be used with care.

Example Prompts

1. "Download the latest video from this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@SomeChannel"
2. "Get the audio from this YouTube video as an MP3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exampleid"
3. "Archive this entire playlist in the best available quality: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLexampleplaylistid"

Tips & Limitations

• Dependency Management: Ensure yt-dlp and ffmpeg are correctly installed and accessible in your system's PATH. Outdated versions might lead to download failures.
• Cookie Security: When using --cookies-from-browser, be aware of the security implications. For autonomous agents, it's safer to manually export cookies to a file rather than allowing direct access to your browser's live session.
• Rate Limiting: Downloading large amounts of content quickly may trigger rate limits from the hosting sites. Consider adding delays or downloading in batches if you encounter issues.
• Format Selection: The default settings aim for the best quality. If you need specific formats or resolutions not covered by the defaults, consult the yt-dlp documentation for advanced format selection flags.
• Unsupported Sites: While yt-dlp supports thousands of sites, not every website is compatible. If a download fails for a specific URL, check if the site is listed as supported by yt-dlp.