get URL from the "-F" list.

[5c0tt-b0t]

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Question

First, THANK YOU! this is amazing & its really appreciated!

I stream music daily using the -g option, e.g:

mpv --no-video $(youtube-dl -f bestaudio "ytsearch: --match-title 'ArtistName SongName'" -g)

Its great, thank you! 👍

Personal problem:
I live in an area with terrible internet connection and I am unable to do anything about it, no matter what provider I use, its the area.

When I stream, its a shame that sometimes the track can be 20mb+ when I all I want is the audio, no video.
So instead, I started to use -F worstvideo which can sometimes help out alot, others times... not really, I lose audio-quality and it still uses way too much bandwidth for an audio track.

Then I found -F, used with grep like so:

youtube-dl -F "ytsearch: --match-title 'ArtistName SongName'" | grep 'audio only'

This is great! it shows me the audio-only files, they are all tiny and 99% of the time, the audio-quality is higher than -f worstvideo produces... I am closer to bliss!

Problem:
I am unable to stream these as they do not return a link like the -g option does, I have tried to use them together with no luck, it seems that either -F & -g do not work together.

The actual question... finally!

Is it possible to return the URL of one of the entries listed with -F ?
If not, please consider this a feature-request!
It would allow users to stream and/or get the URL from the -F list, allowing users to stream audio-only files!, saving bandwidth and still getting great audio-quality too.

BLISS!

Once again, thank you.

[JChris246]

Try using -f instead ... youtube-dl -gf format-code url

[5c0tt-b0t]

Try using -f instead ... youtube-dl -gf format-code url

Thanks for the suggestion, but as I stated earlier, I have already done this and also stated:

bandwidth

worse audio quality

non interactive (options not listed)

I need to youtube-dl -F | grep 'no video' or just get a URL from any entry using -F

[JChris246]

-f and -F are different. -F will list the available formats, whereas -f will take a param (format-code). So for example

youtube-dl -gf 140 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9nh1l8ZIJQ

would return the url for m4a audio

[pukkandan]

What is the issue with -f bestaudio? It only downloads the audio.

But if you really want to get the urls of each format, you can use -j to get the json and then extract the relevent info using jq