I am trying to download all the videos from the playlist:

I am using youtube-dl for this and the command is: 

youtube-dl -citk –format mp4 –yes-playlist

But this only downloads the first video. Not sure what I am doing wrong.

8 Answers

In a shell, & is a special character, advising the shell to start everything up to the & as a process in the background. To avoid this behavior, you can put the URL in quotes. See the youtube-dl FAQ for more information.

Also beware of -citk. With the exception of -i, these options make little sense. See the youtube-dl FAQ for more information. Even -f mp4 looks very strange.

So what you want is:

youtube-dl -i -f mp4 --yes-playlist '

Alternatively, you can just use the playlist ID:

youtube-dl -i PLwJ2VKmefmxpUJEGB1ff6yUZ5Zd7Gegn2
11

I found the best solution after many attempts at solving this problem.

Installation and usage;

For Windows users:

Script:

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist
  • Download youtube-dl.exe file from the offical site.
  • Dowload ffmpeg from the offical site for convert WebM to MP3 (Recomended build version)
  • Exctract all zip files and move youtube-dl.exe, ffmpeg.exe and ffprobe.exe files to the folder that where you want the downloaded MP3 files.
  • Open cmd (Windows terminal) in same folder.
  • Replace the script {your-youtube-playlist-id} parameter with your YouTube playlist id.
  • Run the script.

For macOS/Linux users:

Script:

youtube-dl --ignore-errors --format bestaudio --extract-audio --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 160K --output "%(title)s.%(ext)s" --yes-playlist '
  • Open terminal and if you don't have Homebrew, install it. (Linux users can skip this step.)
  • Run brew install youtube-dl ffmpeg and install youtube-dl and ffmpeg for convert WebM to MP3. (Installation may take longer to install other dependencies.) (For Linux users: install youtube-dl ffmpeg)
  • Open a terminal in the folder where you want to download the MP3 files.
  • Replace the script {your-youtube-playlist-id} parameter with your YouTube playlist id.
  • Run the script.
3

I have tried everything above, but none could solve my problem. I fixed it by updating the old version of youtube-dl to download playlist. To update it 

sudo youtube-dl -U

or

youtube-dl -U

after you have successfully updated using the above command

youtube-dl -cit
1

Your link is not a playlist.

A proper playlist URL looks like this:

Your URL is just the first video OF a certain playlist. It contains instead of .

Pick the playlist by clicking on the title of the playlist on the right side in the list of videos and use this URL.

Some commands which you may find useful while downloading a playlist

Download a playlist

youtube-dl <playlist link>

Best quality video and best quality audio (merged ) + preferred resolution

youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' <playlist link>

This command will download videos in 1080p resolution if 1080p is available otherwise it will download the next best (less than 1080p) resolution. Here, You can use 480 or 720, etc instead of 1080.

Note: Make sure that ‘FFmpeg’ is installed, otherwise video and audio will not be merged.

Best quality video and best quality audio (merged ) + preferred resolution + Add video upload date on the file name

youtube-dl -o "[%(upload_date)s] %(title)s.%(ext)s" -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' <playlist link>

Best quality video and best quality audio (merged ) + Preferred resolution + Add video upload date on the file name + Add uploader name on the file name

youtube-dl -o "[%(upload_date)s] %(title)s [%(uploader)s].%(ext)s" -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' <playlist link>

Subtitle

Best quality video and best quality audio (merged ) + Preferred resolution + Download auto-generated Subtitle

youtube-dl --write-auto-sub -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' <playlist link>

Best quality video and best quality audio (merged ) + Preferred resolution + Download video creator’s uploaded subtitle

youtube-dl --write-sub -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' <playlist link>

Best quality video and best quality audio merged + Preferred resolution + Download video Creator’s uploaded specific language’s subtitle

youtube-dl --write-sub --sub-lang en -f 'bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]' <playlist link>

Removing the v=...& part from the url, and only keep the list=... part. The main problem being the special character &, interpreted by the shell.

You can also quote your 'url' in your command.

More information here (for instance) :

The easiest thing to do is to create a file.txt file and pass the link url link so:

make sure to include the -a parameter in terminal:

youtube-dl -a file.txt

Basically, workaround for this problem could be simple replacing & symbol with it's encoded version %26

For those who are struggling with this problem while doing it through PHP (e.g. shell_exec()) , solution could be str_replace("&", "%26", $shell_command);