how to download latest 5 videos from a youtube user?

[pahud]

I was trying to download lastest 5 videos from this user and I tried this approach:

$ youtube-dl --max-downloads 5 http://www.youtube.com/user/ChinaTimes

but youtube-dl was reading all its video ids for a long time.

Is there another good approach?

[jaimeMF]

Running youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/user/ChinaTimes --playlist-end 5 would normally work. The problem is that the user has more than 100000 videos, which is the limit of the youtube api.
In theory we could only extract the first 5 video ids or a reasonable number of them without failing, but it's not trivial.

[TigersWay]

Hop ... :-)

Could it be done with some feed/rss?

[jaimeMF]

With b7ab059, if you use youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/user/ChinaTimes --playlist-end 5 it will only download the first page of the playlist.
It will be available in the next version, but if you need it, you can use the version from the git repo.
Thanks for the report.

[phihag]

Since --max-downloads is pertinent to video filtering, you want --playlist-end. The speedup has made it into youtube-dl 2014.01.22.4. Type youtube-dl -U to update.