Youtube-dl

This extension uses the youtube-dl or the yt-dlp package to download episodes and/or refresh subscriptions.

It will let you download episodes in any format available from Youtube.

It will let you see more than the last 15 episodes in the channel or playlist.

This extension overrides Youtube subscriptions globally so you don’t have to enable it podcast by podcast.

Dependencies

The yt-dlp package is already provided in the Windows and macOS prebuilt applications.

If you need to install it manually, pip install youtube_dl or pip install yt-dlp.

Downloading episodes with youtube-dl

The main advantage of this extension is to use youtube-dl to download formats not available natively.

For instance with youtube-dl you can download the audio only:

Go to Preferences > Extensions to activate the youtube-dl extension;
go to Preferences > Edit Configuration;
search for youtube and set the youtube.preferred_fmt_ids parameter to bestaudio[ext=ogg], bestaudio.

youtube.preferred_fmt_ids takes a list of format strings separated by comma: bestaudio[ext=ogg],bestaudio is translated to youtube-dl format bestaudio[ext=ogg]/bestaudio, meaning preferably the best audio quality in Ogg Vorbis format, then any audio-only if ogg is not available.

See https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl#format-selection for details about the youtube-dl format specification and for more examples.

Managing subscriptions with youtube-dl

Youtube-dl will load the page for your subscription (channel, playlist, …) and find all videos there. This way you will get all episodes, not only the last 15 like in Youtube’s own RSS feed.

The major drawback is that youtube-dl is very slow to get this information because it has to download and parse each video page.

Note that the extension will only parse new videos so it’s faster on refresh than when subscribing for the first time.

It is possible to go back to the limited but fast RSS feed by setting extensions.youtube-dl.manage_channels to false.

Settings

setting	value	description
extensions.youtube-dl.manage_channels	true/false	false to use Youtube’s RSS feed (faster but only 15 episodes)
extensions.youtube-dl.manage_downloads	true/false	false to download using built-in class (if youtube-dl doesn’t work)

gPodder 3.11.0 added a preferences page for youtube-dl to better find these settings. The manage_channel setting is listed as “Parse YouTube channel feeds …” and the manage_downloads setting is listed as “Download all supported episodes …”.

youtube-dl extension will use the proxy set in gPodder proxy settings.

Links:

Extension Source