I read somewhere that it is possible to rip youtube videos (music only) without the need for converting it into an mp3 as such.

The online conversion process (naturally) results in loss of quality, and (apparently) it is possible to preserve the original video’s audio quality via a direct rip. If so, how would it be done and what format would it be in anyway?

thanks

  • guitars are realEnglish
    27•2 years ago

    if you use yt-dlp or youtube-dl’s -F flag you can get back a list of available formats. There are typically separately encoded audio tracks for most content on youtube, meaning you can just give it the stream id and get an m4a or webm file with no extra work.

    • @[email protected]English
      11•2 years ago

      The fork yt-dlp already downloads in the highest quality.

      The problem is that, that’s (sometimes?) webm format…

      • guitars are realEnglish
        2•2 years ago

        Your intended playback device impacts which format you’ll want. Or maybe I’m just fussy, I dunno.

      • neo (he/him)English
        3•2 years ago

        WARNING: webm doesn’t support embedding a thumbnail, mkv will be used

        Embed thumbnails, you’ll never see a webm again.

        • @[email protected]English
          2•2 years ago

          I resorted to a shitty script that gets the most m4a video quality using grep and awk.

          Is the thumbnail embedding a yt-dlp feature?

          • neo (he/him)English
            2•2 years ago

            yes but i think it’s also present in youtube-dl --embed-thumbnail