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Clipgrab w/YouTube: How bad is the audio quality? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've been using Clipgrab (macOS) to download music (mp3s) from YouTube. I've seen some mentions that the quality (real bitrate as opposed to what the file states) is bad to begin with on YouTube and that downloaders might make it worse. How bad is the quality of what I'm downloading? Any better downloaders or does the quality suck to begin with?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It varies based on the age of the video, newer ones do indeed have separate audio downloads. You can force audio only with

yt-dlp -f bestaudio

This will cause the script to only consider audio-only formats, if bandwidth is a concern. However, how it decides which one is "best" is beyond me. For example, I tried one video and got a webm that contains only an audio track:

~ $ yt-dlp -f bestaudio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[youtube] Extracting URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading webpage
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading ios player API JSON
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading android player API JSON
[youtube] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading m3u8 information
[info] dQw4w9WgXcQ: Downloading 1 format(s): 251
[download] Destination: /data/data/com.termux/files/home/storage/movies/ytdl/20091025__Rick_Astley_-_Never_Gonna_Give_You_Up_Official_Music_Video.webm
[download] 100% of    3.28MiB in 00:00:00 at 6.91MiB/s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

https://piped.video/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I deleted my comment after I checked the command line I was using and testing it out. The CPU usage was because I was using the --audio-format flag with something other than m4a/opus or whatever it is that youtube uses natively. And the file I saw on disk was not the video, it was the audio file in youtube's native format.

For reference, I'm using $ytdl -f "bestaudio/best" -ciw -o "$audioroot/%(title)s (%(upload_date>%Y-%m-%d)s).%(ext)s" --extract-audio --audio-quality 0 --audio-format mp3 "$vidurl".