Best Youtube converter/downloader "A must have question"

[Kando]

Oh yeah, I know google is the constant 'big brother', and I have, and usually always do, immediately go into any and all the google settings that I can find and turn off as many tracking settings as possible. I also know that some are very well hidden within a maze of seemingly non-related links. As it stands I have turned off as many as I can find, but who knows if those are all there are. I also use Ublock to try and eliminate a few things as well. I find a vpn helps at times, but other times not, depends upon the website.

[Kando]

What I'm suggesting is, that you take whatever you are using now, and just replace the '-f 140' with '-x --audio-format "aac"' . So your mentioned line

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 C:\ytdl\yt-dlp.exe -f 140 "yt link" --path "C:\Users\MY Name\Documents\Beatles info\Miscellaneous music - info and video downloads\yt-dlp music downloads" 

Becomes

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 C:\ytdl\yt-dlp.exe -x --audio-format "aac" "yt link" --path "C:\Users\MY Name\Documents\Beatles info\Miscellaneous music - info and video downloads\yt-dlp music downloads"

Okey-dokey, I tried your suggested method, and got a bit of a surprise. I hadn't realized that it would result in a compressed file being downloaded and then automatically being extracted, with the compressed file then being auto deleted. Was somewhat amazed that a much larger file was being created, until I worked out what was going on, lol. Leaving the "aac" part of the cmd line in place automatically downloaded the 251 webm codec, which I thought I had tried dl-ing once or twice before on other yt links, but with no luck.

Had to do a bit of research to figure out what was going on, and then a bit to see what the differences were between 140 aac and 251 opus. I found a lot of so-called technical reasons for why one should supposedly work better than the other, but found almost no practical use data to choose between one or the other. The only thing I do know is that the 251 opus version tends to dl at a slightly higher bit rate and sampling rate, which should possibly give it a very slight edge, but again, I have come across no practical testing to show this.

FYI: the new cmd line info you gave me did not make any difference in dl time, oh well. Oh, how does one replace the "aac" portion of your cmd line with another audio code? I tried just replacing the aac with the new audio number (140, etc.), but all I got were errors.

[harrylime]

aac is the name of a codec, in general, 140 is a specific track format youtube may offer. Which afaik is aac too, that’s why I suggested it. But to use another instead, you need to use a different generic name like ‘mp3’. Just like you order ‘tikki massala’ vs ‘butter chicken’ and not ‘nr 140 on the menu’ if you catch my drift.

But why are you looking for a different codec than aac to begin with? It’s my go-to option because mp3 is notably worse, and the opus and similar codecs are less compatible with players. To preserve maximum quality, you can let it use opus though (Youtube’s native format) and only convert later on if you really need to. For that just use the -x option and yt-dlp will pick the best curry that yt has to offer

[Kando]

aac is the name of a codec, in general, 140 is a specific track format youtube may offer. Which afaik is aac too, that’s why I suggested it. But to use another instead, you need to use a different generic name like ‘mp3’. Just like you order ‘tikki massala’ vs ‘butter chicken’ and not ‘nr 140 on the menu’ if you catch my drift.

But why are you looking for a different codec than aac to begin with? It’s my go-to option because mp3 is notably worse, and the opus and similar codecs are less compatible with players. To preserve maximum quality, you can let it use opus though (Youtube’s native format) and only convert later on if you really need to. For that just use the -x option and yt-dlp will pick the best curry that yt has to offer

Yes, aac is a codec, but since I am not exactly a coder I was not sure what could be substituted for aac in the cmd line you gave as an example. And, yes, from what I have gathered 140 is produced from an aac codec. The 251 format, however, is produced from an opus codec. But in the end they are all turned into an mp4 file via ytdlp. Therefore, there really shouldn't be any problem with various players as far as I can surmise. I was simply curious as to whether or not substituting a different codec/format might have an effect on dl times. That might not seem to make sense in general terms, but I have been around long enough to know that one can never be sure about some things until they have been tried, lol. Regardless, I haven't seen many examples of yt cmd lines so I had no idea what sort of examples could be used.

As to why I might look for another codec other than aac, well, to start with until I came to realize what your cmd line example was doing I really did not know much at all about the codecs used for yt. When I further realized that your suggested cmd line example was retrieving an opus codec, which produced a much larger final music file, it naturally got me to wondering if a better sounding file might be produced from it. I was never looking for anything mp3 related, so I am not sure where that came from, as I realize that both the aac and opus codecs get translated into the mp4 format, and of course that is a better sounding format than mp3.

I have also come to realize that, supposedly, even the the opus codec is generally created from a higher bit rate aac one to begin with, but because the opus codec uses a slightly higher bit rate and sample rate than a final comparative aac codec supplied with most yt links, that it might have a chance to sound slightly better depending upon the music, etc.

So, in the end, it looks like I have simply been tracked by some big brother entity, or another, and all my yt dl-ing will generally be throttled, until I possibly come up with a method to overcome it, lol. And secondly, I will have to do some serious listening comparisons to see if dl-ing the opus/251 codec/format combination will be worthwhile, or not, or whether I should just stick with the significantly smaller aac/140 codec/format file size.

Either way, thanks for your original cmd line example as it has helped me learn quite a bit more about what constitutes various yt formats, etc. And of course created even more questions, lol.

[Kando]

Okay, finally got to wondering why, when using the cmd line with "aac" in it that the dl is the 251 format, guessing compressed opus codec, with much larger than normal file. So, I do some experimentation replacing the aac with opus, on a new yt file cmd line, and I end up with about a 3.6mb file. But the dl-ed file type appears as 'opus' on my hard drive. So I immediately guess that the file stays in the compressed condition, when run that way. VLC has no issue playing it. Then I run the yt dl again but with the aac back in place, and I get the 251 format file converted to m4a, and the file is about 8.2mb.

I now look at the various lines produced by both cmd lines. Both dl's say they are dl-ing the 251 format, and all lines within the dl read identical, except for a slight difference in dl speed. Both show a file was dl-ed, extracted, and the original file deleted. How in the world does the opus run dl-ed file remain at 3.6mb, despite a file supposedly being extracted and then I assume decompressed. Is a file extracted, but not decompressed? And why does a cmd line with aac in it even dl a 251 format, which I thought was just opus related? I thought that the 140 format is the aac version.

Now that all being said I do understand that these all start out as a higher bit rate aac codec file of some type, and while being translated for yt one is converted to opus at a relatively high bit rate and sample rate, while the other gets retranslated into aac again but at a slightly lower bit and sample rate file than the opus version.

Anyone want to play? My head hurts.

[Lord Reith]

So, in the end, it looks like I have simply been tracked by some big brother entity, or another, and all my yt dl-ing will generally be throttled, until I possibly come up with a method to overcome it, lol. And secondly, I will have to do some serious listening comparisons to see if dl-ing the opus/251 codec/format combination will be worthwhile, or not, or whether I should just stick with the significantly smaller aac/140 codec/format file size.

I don't think opus is worth bothering with given its limited compatibility. My phone sure as hell can't play opus files.

Regarding the other matter, you can just download all your audios at once. Open each one in a separate ytdlp window and download them in parallel rather than one after the other. If you have ten files to grab, that will make it 10x faster.

[Kando]

I don't think opus is worth bothering with given its limited compatibility. My phone sure as hell can't play opus files.

Regarding the other matter, you can just download all your audios at once. Open each one in a separate ytdlp window and download them in parallel rather than one after the other. If you have ten files to grab, that will make it 10x faster.

I don't know about the opus. I mean if ytdlp will download it and translate it into m4a just as fast as it dl's the 140 m4a version, why not? At least until I can tell if it is worth it sonically.

As for the simultaneous dl's, makes sense. But I can be very single minded, lol.

[Egg_Crisis]

A few years ago before they moved to .opus those .webm files used to contain .ogg audio. I remember doing a comparison and spectrally there was no noticeable difference with them both having the same ~16k cutoff. When I'm on my desktop I'll have a look at those opus and make a comparison.

A few years ago if you downloaded 720p or higher it had 192kbps audio but when they changed over to separate audio and video tracks they stopped all that.

[Egg_Crisis]

Ok, downloading "aac" downloads the 251 file, then it re-encodes it to .m4a, that's why it's bigger, it's just getting bloated during the re-encode.

Downloading "opus" downloads the 251 but keeps it in it's native format, no re-encoding.

And when I compared spectrally with type 140, the 140 had a 16k cutoff and 251 had a 20k cutoff, so the 251 is definitely better.

And just to note with some files there's no opus available. When that happens, "aac" downloads the 140, and "opus" downloads the 140 and re-encodes it, so it's probably better to download by specifying 251 or 140 that way you know what you're getting.

[harrylime]

I don't know about the opus. I mean if ytdlp will download it and translate it into m4a just as fast as it dl's the 140 m4a version, why not? At least until I can tell if it is worth it sonically.

Just checked and the downside of this is that the m4a file will be created from the already lossy opus file. That means you will lose more quality than requesting 140 which is m4a directly. That being said, Youtube internally works with opus by default, as it's license-free. That could also mean that a 140 is simply the same conversion from opus, just done at Youtube's side. And thus both result in comparable files.

When I'm downloading to listen on my iphone with foobar, I always download opus to get the highest quality available.