Setup

Add the following to the .bashrc to enable your alias. The downloadbest alias always tries to get the really best format, but does not work all the times!

alias downloadmp3="python3 ~/.youtube-dl -x -i --prefer-ffmpeg --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail"
alias downloadbestmp3="python3 ~/.youtube-dl -x -i --format "bestaudio/best" --prefer-ffmpeg --audio-format mp3 --embed-thumbnail"
alias downloadmp4="python3 ~/.youtube-dl -i --prefer-ffmpeg --format mp4 --embed-thumbnail"
alias downloadbestmp4="python3 ~/.youtube-dl --format "bestvideo+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/bestvideo+bestaudio/best" --merge-output-format mp4 --embed-thumbnail"

Add the following into your crontab to make sure the used binary is always the latest version (updated at 14:00 every day) - this prevents strange errors after some time the binary was downloaded.

0 14 * * * bash -c "wget -q https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -O $HOME/.youtube-dl && chmod +x $HOME/.youtube-dl"

You must install the following packages to ensure the downloaded files can be convterted to the required format.

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Usage

…just an example here:

downloadmp4 "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YE7VzlLtp-4"