How to search and get YouTube videos using the yt-dlp command line tool.

You can either list the video id’s and title or instantly download the video.

Searching YouTube videos with yt-dlp is done using the ytsearch flag. You can pass in the number of videos to process form the search by adding this value at the end ytseach:8 is for 8 videos.

You can also pass in all e.g ytsearchall:

Searching YouTube videos

This will list out 10 video id’s and the titles for the term “lebron james”:

yt-dlp ytsearch10:lebron james --get-id --get-title

Alternatively, you can download the videos directly without passing any –get-* flag values.

yt-dlp ytsearch4:lebron james

Or

yt-dlp ytsearch20:lebron james --max-downloads 5

To get desired media formats pass in the format flag first:

yt-dlp -f 'bv*+ba' ytsearch2:lebron james