Youtube to Mp3

October 17, 2010 6:19 AM

Youtube to Mp3 filter: How can I quickly and easily save a whole PLAYLIST to my computer?

I want to save my bands' concert videos as mp3 files and they are all in a playlist. I know how to save each one separately, but would like to do it all at once.
Any tips or programs?
Thanks in advance!

posted by freddymetz to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

DownloadHelper is the best I can offer. It allows conversion, and buffering of many downloads, but of course you still have to manually open each link in the playlist...

The bookmarklet Open Selected Links will make opening tons of them easier.
posted by IAmBroom at 7:20 AM on October 17, 2010

It's ages since I've used it, and I'm not sure it'll do exactly what you want, but have a look at the Snap Links firefox add-on. It allows you highlight a number of links, then do a variety of things with them (eg open in tabs, open in windows, download) depending on your preferences.
posted by Ahab at 8:44 AM on October 17, 2010

Just had a second look at this, and I'm not sure you actually need anything like snap links or multi links. Video Downloadhelper should be able to do it all. First install downloadhelper. Then select a number of youtube vids by left clicking and dragging over them, then right click anywhere in the selected area and hit the download youtube videos option. That'll take care of the downloading bit. The conversion bit needs to be set up according to the instructions here. Looks like you can do it manually or on the fly.
posted by Ahab at 9:11 AM on October 17, 2010

Last time I did this it was a sorta hacky manual process since the playlists is created via JavaScript and I didn't want to spend too much time finding an easier way to dump the links.

Save each page of the edit playlist view (the one that lets you re-order/delete/etc) into a file with your browser. Then some Perl-fu to extract a list of the links to the videos.

perl -lne 'm,href="(http://www\.youtube\.com\/watch\?v=[^"]+)">, && print $1' < saved_page1.html > page1.list

This gives you a list of video files on that page...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xlcVu8SLDdo
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40K2S0-5Xo0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8YcZbiU4EK4
...

Then you can just use youtube-dl to download all of the videos. It's easily googleable and is a little Python script that finds the best quality version and gives you some options on how to name the downloaded files. I forget the details but it's something like:

youtube-dl --best-quality --batch-file=page1.list --title

Then I used ffmpeg to extract the audio depending on the format of the audio in the downloaded file. Using -acodec copy and the right extension on the output file to prevent it from re-encoding it.

ffmpeg -i $INFILE -vn -acodec copy $OUT.ext

(This way you can keep it M4A if you happen to get a good guality video (maybe at least). You could just leave out the -acodec copy and give it a .mp3 extension to encode anything to mp3 if you wanted.

I'm sure there are some nice apps out there somewhere that would do all of this for you but I haven't needed to do it often enough to bother finding one. I think the hardest part is the app would need to be browser based, or be capable of doing its own Javascript to actually get the filenames to download from the playlist page.
posted by zengargoyle at 9:42 AM on October 17, 2010

To expand on zengargoyle's post, it looks like youtube-dl itself supports going through the youtube playlist itself and retrieving all videos. It should be possible to work some shell scripting to run youtube-dl and then run ffmpeg over the resulting files, letting you hand it just a youtube playlist URL.
posted by arrjay at 12:29 PM on October 17, 2010