Hi friends,
I’ve been using yt-dlp to download a few things off of YouTube Music, and I just wanted to ask a few questions about best practice. Right now, I’ve just been doing it this way:
yt-dlp -f bestaudio -x
I’ve found that has usually downloaded .opus files (though, .m4a as of late—anyone know why this is?), but, I was wondering (for the sake of compatibility with different music players), do I lose anything by passing --recode mp3
?
Also, about losing the .opus files, I got this output when I ran yt-dlp -F
on a link:
|ID | EXT RESOLUTION FPS CH | FILESIZE TBR PROTO | VCODEC VBR ACODEC ABR ASR MORE INFO
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
233 mp4 audio only | m3u8 | audio only unknown Default
234 mp4 audio only | m3u8 | audio only unknown Default
249 webm audio only 2 | 1.30MiB 64k https | audio only opus 64k 48k low, THROTTLED, webm_dash
250 webm audio only 2 | 1.64MiB 81k https | audio only opus 81k 48k low, THROTTLED, webm_dash
139 m4a audio only 2 | 1019.36KiB 49k https | audio only mp4a.40.5 49k 22k low, m4a_dash
251 webm audio only 2 | 3.03MiB 149k https | audio only opus 149k 48k medium, THROTTLED, webm_dash
140 m4a audio only 2 | 2.64MiB 130k https | audio only mp4a.40.2 130k 44k medium, m4a_dash
Any insights as to why I’m getting that throttling, and why it’s downloading m4a instead of opus? Is it even that much of a difference? Is there some option I can pass to yt-dlp to avoid this?
Any help is much appreciated!
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It’s probably deciding what the best audio is by bitrate (file size) instead of codec.
This would not be the default behavior of yt-dlp. Run
yt-dlp -vF <video>
to view the sort order used. Acodec should come before abr.It used to be the behavior of the original youtube-dl, however.