Faster Downloads

[tytyguy]

I love youtube-dl! Its amazing... but when trying to download larger files (1 hour or longer) it takes a decent amount of time. Ive heard of aria2 and some wrappers you can use but they haven't seem to been update in quite some time. Is there anything available to make the downloads faster without losing quality?

[wyatt8740]

If the server is slow to send out packets, then your PC will be slow to recieve them. There's no way I know of around that.

[phihag]

@wyatt8740 You are assuming that the bottleneck is the local connection. If it is not, using multiple connections in parallel can help.

[dashed]

I usually retrieve the url via youtube-dl and pipe it to arai2c. That's what I do.

Something like this can work:

#!/bin/bash

# Input
address=$1

video_filename="$(youtube-dl --get-filename -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' --restrict-filenames $address)"
video_url="$(youtube-dl --get-url $address)"

# modify aria2c options as needed
aria2c -x16 -s20 -k1M --out=$video_filename $video_url

[rbrito]

@dashed,

You may also need to tell aria2c to use the same headers that youtube-dl uses, or you may get some problems, like trouble with user-agent sniffing (server-side) code.

[dashed]

@rbrito I hadn't thought of that. I didn't seem to need it for my use cases. Doesn't seem hard to set. aria2c has --user-agent=<USER_AGENT> which can be set from youtube-dl's --dump-user-agent option.

[yan12125]

For aria2c/axel-like threaded downloading, see #350. Closing as a duplicate.

[yan12125]

Sorry, this issue is kind of different than #350. Reopening.

[Gaploid]

Any news here guys?