Download Live Stream Youtube

Though I think ShareX is still the best freeware for this (especially on compression with long videos). There's another: youtube-dl.

youtube-dl is a command line program. Simple. But requires ffmpeg or I got this error: "...download detected but ffmpeg or avconv could not be found...", which I downloaded and extracted to C:\. Then I need to set the Environmental Variables to the ffmpeg\bin folder (probably not that important with environmental path, because in the youtube-dl command line, it appears that I had to specify --ffmpeg-location PATH anyway)

Sample command: youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFEQK1BMnAQ --ffmpeg-location "C:\ffmpeg\bin"

youtube-dl is better than ShareX in a way that it can download a published video faster than ShareX because ShareX requires live capture.

So far, I can't find a way to download an ongoing live stream from the beginning (the very beginning of the stream), in spite of the many ways to speed download hours of youtube videos within minutes. Even though Youtube live streams allow user to slide the video backward in time to watch what's missed from the beginning of the ongoing stream.

I wish I know how this can be achieved.

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One Response to Download Live Stream Youtube

  1. timlyg says:

    yt-dlp has come a long way. The new Windows executable works flawlessly as of now. I downloaded the entire recorded livestream video from David Tong's Christianity and AI (Kekristenan dan AI)

    Simple command would work:
    Just download the yt-dlp.exe file, which is 18MB as of now.
    # Use it to download a video

    # generally a smaller size; good quality
    yt-dlp -f best https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhQ6zEky0o

    # bigger size; best quality
    yt-dlp https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VUhQ6zEky0o

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