How to download a video from Youtube and convert it into a mp3 file? (Or a mpeg video, or…). The most complicated part was to actually download the flv-movie. After you got this on your harddrive it is quite easy to perform more conversation to diffent file formats. Here the are my instructions for downloading and converting to mp3.

Downloading

I used a small python script youtube-dl for downloading the video data.

  • It is available in the Ubuntu repositories 
    sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
  • If you encounter some problems you also could do a source checkout from BitBucket (requires that Mercurial is installed): 
    hg clone http://bitbucket.org/rg3/youtube-dl/
  • Download the video from a terminal: 
     youtube-dl http://www.tube.com/watch?v=videoid
  • After the download you will find a videoid.flv in your folder

Getting the audio data

For extracting the audio data I used ffmpeg.

  • If you haven’t installed it already: 
    sudo apt-get install ffmpeg
  • We will extract the audio data to a simple wave file. This file is gonna be large, so make sure you delete it afterwards. 
    ffmpeg -i videoid.flv output.wav

Converting to MP3

For converting the wav file to a mp3 file I used lame.

  • Run (the “-b” arguments sets the bitrate of the mp3): 
    lame -b 192 -h output.wav output.mp3

Notes

  • There a lot of other ways to get the data. Instead of lame you could use mplayer, but this way I alway ended with broken mp3 files.
  • Instead of converting to wave file you also could create a mpeg video and then create the mp3 file directly from this video.
  • Lame and also ffmpeg have tons of options available from the command line, which could increase speed and quality of the conversation.