Downloading, installing and upgrading Youtube-dl on Ubuntu 20.04

Youtube-dl is a command-line program to download Youtube videos in a variety of formats. Youtube-dl is designed to handle archive type tasks such as whole channel or playlist downloads.

Installing Youtube-dl

Firstly update package information with

sudo apt-get update

Download Youtube-dl using curl and move it to the usr bin folder as a program

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Alter the permissions (read and execute)

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Install the Python 3 pip package which is used to upgrade Youtube-dl:

sudo apt install python3-pip

Upgrade

When the time comes to upgrade Youtube-dl use:

pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl

Using Youtube-dl is done by calling followed by the options and URL

youtube-dl [OPTIONS] [URL]