I finally took some time recently to cobble together a set of bash scripts to allow me to download local copies of videos from youtube, heavily piggy backing off the jbergknoff/youtube-dl Docker image and the associated youtube-dl project.

asciicast

You can add the following bash functions to your own env files (I’ve a post on my own setup in the works).

Then assuming you have Docker running you can download a Youtube video as follows:

youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPsu4OH9hsk ~/brooklyn-gource.mp4

You can omit the target file and it will download to ./video.mp4.