Another seemingly hidden feature with yt-dlp is the ability to save the YouTube video comments into a JSON file.
With yt-dlp downloading the video comments into a JSON file is done with the --write-comments
flag.
yt-dlp --write-comments VIDEO_URL
For popular videos with a lot of comments, this can take several minutes.
An example of a comment in the JSON file:
{ "id": "UgzewWuFZvI0FsncvKR4AaABAg", "text": "These double ads are really getting on my nerves", "timestamp": 1614816000, "time_text": "1 year ago", "like_count": 1, "is_favorited": false, "author": "Michael M", "author_id": "UCKYW7m35n1kBassjpjakd7g", "author_thumbnail": "https://yt3.ggpht.com/ytc/AKedOLRr_ZwtCbdnb_qiqsKkwnTT4Y0eSW9SpgklicNt=s176-c-k-c0x00ffffff-no-rj", "author_is_uploader": false, "parent": "root" }
This flag is a part of the --write-info-json
section where video metadata gets saved to the JSON file too. If you only want the video comments add --no-write-info-json
.