Replacing youtube-dl with yt-dlp

At the time of writing, youtube-dl hasn’t been updated since July 2021 and has many unresolved issues, some of which cause real problems with my RSS/YouTube workflow. In steps yt-dlp to the rescue which fixes the issues I’ve experienced and continues to be updated to this day.

Now while I usually like to keep as many items as possible managed via my package manager (and there are yt-dlp AUR packages available), youtube-dl was one of the exceptions I’d make. Usually I’ll stick to the same version until I need to manually update for a broken website.

Uninstall any older versions you have floating around on your system and install the latest binary from GitHub and make it executable:

sudo curl -L https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/releases/latest/download/yt-dlp -o /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp
sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp

Now you can symlink the new binary to the old name to emulate any calls to youtube-dl with yt-dlp using:

sudo ln -s /usr/local/bin/yt-dlp /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Now ensure you can update the binary using

sudo youtube-dl -U

And you’re done.

• Edit 2021-10-27: yt-dlp is now available as an official package making this guide obsolete