what are the best video formats for youtube

What are the best video formats for youtube 720p#
What are the best video formats for youtube mp4#

Notice that youtube-dl has labeled the last option 1280x720 as the 'best' quality and that's what it will download by default, but that the line starting with 137 is actually higher quality 1920x1080.

What are the best video formats for youtube 720p#

Usually it will only download 720p as its max even if you can see 1080p on. You can download 1080p using youtube-dl, but you need to do a little extra work. If ffmpeg or avconv is not available, youtube-dl should fall back to the single file -f best option instead of the default.Ĭlick here for more detailed information and some different examples.Īlso, click to see this related answer by Gabriel Staples.

What are the best video formats for youtube mp4#

These commands will ensure you download the highest quality mp4 video and m4a audio from the video as a single file or will merge them back into a single mp4 (using ffmpeg in my case). Or as Gabriel Staples pointed out here, the following command will typically select the actual best single file video quality resolution instead of video quality bit-rate: youtube-dl -f best '' If you encounter any error during the muxing process or an issue with the video quality selection, you can use one of the following commands: youtube-dl -f 'bestvideo+bestaudio/bestvideo+bestaudio' -merge-output-format mp4 '' Or optionally use the following flags to automatically download the best audio and video tracks that are available as a single file: youtube-dl -f best '' The best quality is 22 so use -f 22 instead of -F to download the MP4 video with 1280x720 resolution like this: youtube-dl -f 22 '' P9pzm5b6FFY: Extracting video information P9pzm5b6FFY: Downloading video info webpage To select the video quality, first use the -F option to list the available formats, here’s an example, youtube-dl -F ''

To download a video, you type the URL after the command like so: youtube-dl ''