| name | dl-yt-video |
| description | Download YouTube videos with best quality video and audio using the dl-yt-video tool. Use when asked to download YouTube video, fetch video by ID, save video as mp4, or get high quality video from YouTube. |
dl-yt-video Skill
This skill enables downloading YouTube videos with best quality video and audio using the dl-yt-video Python CLI tool.
When to Use This Skill
- User requests downloading a YouTube video
- User provides a YouTube video ID or URL
- User wants to save video in MP4 format with best quality
- User needs to download a video to a specific directory
- User wants to automatically create output directory if missing
Prerequisites
- Python 3.7+ installed
yt-dlp installed (automatically via requirements.txt)ffmpeg installed (for merging video and audio streams)- The
dl-yt-video tool located at $AGENT_CWD/tools/dl-yt-video/
Installation
If the tool is not yet installed, run:
cd $AGENT_CWD/tools/dl-yt-video
pip install -r requirements.txt
Usage
Basic Command
python $AGENT_CWD/tools/dl-yt-video/dl-yt-video.py <VIDEO_ID> <OUTPUT_DIR>
Arguments
VIDEO_ID: The YouTube video ID (e.g., d3UTywBDSW4) from the video URL https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEO_IDOUTPUT_DIR: Directory where the downloaded video will be saved
Example
To download the video with ID d3UTywBDSW4 and save it to ~/videos:
python $AGENT_CWD/tools/dl-yt-video/dl-yt-video.py d3UTywBDSW4 ~/videos
Features
- Downloads best quality video and audio streams available
- Automatically merges streams into MP4 format
- Creates output directory if it doesn't exist
- Output filename is based on video title (sanitized for filesystem)
- Handles Unicode characters in video titles (encoding safe)
- Graceful error handling (invalid video ID, network issues, etc.)
Troubleshooting
- yt-dlp not found: Install with
pip install yt-dlp
- ffmpeg not found: Install ffmpeg from https://ffmpeg.org/ (required for merging)
- Output directory cannot be created: Check permissions
- Video not found: Verify the video ID is correct and the video is publicly accessible
- Encoding errors: The tool uses safe printing to avoid Unicode encoding issues on Windows
- JavaScript runtime warning: yt-dlp may warn about missing JavaScript runtime; the tool will still work but some formats may be missing. Install Node.js or Deno to suppress warning.
Notes
- Downloaded videos are saved as
<sanitized title>.mp4 in the output directory.
- The tool uses
bestvideo[ext=mp4]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/best[ext=mp4]/best format selection.
- If the video title contains characters invalid for filesystems, they are replaced with underscores.
- The tool first extracts video metadata to get the title, then downloads with sanitized filename.
- For testing, video ID
d3UTywBDSW4 can be used (a public YouTube video).
