A good web interface for youtube-dl that allows you to download arbitrary mixes of audio and video, including up to the highest quality such as 8K.

There is no user-friendly method to download the highest quality of a YouTube video, without errors, and without installing software on your computer.

The web application, youtube-dl-web aims to create a user-friendly interface for downloading such videos.

• ⏩ Quick Download of pre-encoded YouTube Videos

  Most YouTube downloaders would only provide the sources that youtube-dl-web provides in its Quick Download category. Although preservation of quality is important, the Quick Download option is for users who simply just want an mp4, of a decent quality, downloaded fast.

• ✨ Quality Selection

  The most powerful feature of this interface is the ability to select any pair of audio and video for a resulting matroska video file. Unfortunately, due to the differing nature of the video and audio containers, matroska is the only option that can be used in order to preserve fast download speeds, and original quality. Again, the Quick Download section exists.

• 📡 Direct Download Streaming

  Youtube-dl-web never saves a file on the server disk, or makes you wait to start receiving data. As soon as a stream is received from YouTube, it immediately starts streaming over to your browser, for a direct download. This also works for the "pick your own" section, ensuring download speeds essentially limited only by your network connection.

• 🎞️ Unlimited Video Length

  Given that the video data is streamed directly, there is no limit to the size of a video you can download using the website, unlike some other alternative download sites. Videos that were previously live are supported, alongside their full Live Chat JSON.

• 📢 Subtitle Download

  Download videos with their subtitles in all supported languages, with options to embed directly into the video (experimental) or to export separately as either a .srt, .ass or .vtt file!

• 👍 User Friendly UI

  The UI is modern, easy to use and informative. Arguably the biggest limitation of youtube-dl is the command line interface, as most users do not know how to use it, and would often go back to subpar websites for downloading videos, at a lower quality.

• 🔗 Direct Substitution

  You can simply replace "www.youtube.com" with the tool's URL (keeping the watch?v= part), and it will automatically pick up the video URL you are trying to use.

Youtube-dl-web relies on three main components:

• The built frontend files, which are served to the user
• The backend API server, which does the downloading
• The NGINX Proxy, which routes requests to the API server, and serves the frontend files

The API server and the NGINX Proxy can most easily be deployed using Docker Compose. The frontend can be built manually with yarn, although a build script which accomplishes this in a platform independent way (using a temporary Docker container) is included.

For the hosting experience to be smooth for everyone, youtube-dl-web can be easily deployed using Docker Compose in a secure manner, secluded from your host operating system and without you having to install any dependencies.

Verify you have them installed with:

$ docker --version
Docker version 20.10.12

$ docker-compose --version
Docker Compose version 2.2.3

The actual versions don't matter much, just about anything should do!

If you're on an ARM system, such as a Raspberry Pi (untested) you can install Docker Compose as so:

$ sudo curl -L --fail https://raw.githubusercontent.com/linuxserver/docker-docker-compose/master/run.sh -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose
$ sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose

$ git clone https://github.com/xxcodianxx/youtube-dl-web

⚠️ This tutorial assumes you are running the following commands as UID 1000. Make sure the folders are owned by UID 1000 & GID 1000, as the automatic containerized build process depends on it.

$ chown -R 1000:1000 youtube-dl-web

This makes sure that all of the HTML is compiled ready for the webserver to serve.

$ cd frontend
$ bash ./build.sh

This will start all the necessary containers in their environments.

$ cd ..
$ docker-compose up -d --build

You can look at your running containers with:

$ docker-compose ps

And view their logs with:

$ docker-compose logs -f

The steps above describe running youtube-dl-web without SSL, meaning that all traffic sent to and from your webserver is over the internet in the clear!

It's not like there's that much sensitive data being sent over, but it's nice to have HTTPS support.

For home hosting, this is not required at all.

The NGINX config is set up for Let's Encrypt certificates.

Once generated with certbot, they can be found in /etc/letsencrypt/live/yourdomain.example.net/*.pem

Add your certificates (files fullchain.pem and privkey.pem) into the nginx/certs directory. You can obtain these from Let's Encrypt with certbot.

First, stop the cluster if you have it running:

$ docker-compose down

Then, go into the docker-compose.yml file and follow the commented directions.

After this, repeat step 3 again, and you should be good to go!