YouTube

Works with a single video or a playlist. Any URL with a list= parameter downloads every video in the playlist.

scraper youtube https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID
scraper youtube "https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAYLIST_ID"

Quality

The highest-quality format is downloaded by default. --quality caps the video resolution (2160p, 1440p, 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p, or 240p):

scraper --quality 1080p https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID

If the chosen video format has no audio, the best audio track is downloaded separately and muxed in with ffmpeg. Preview sizes are estimated from the selected formats and may differ slightly from the final file.

Audio only

scraper --audio-only https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID       # m4a
scraper --audio-only mp3 https://youtu.be/VIDEO_ID

m4a stream-copies AAC when possible and transcodes other audio, such as Opus, to AAC.

yt-dlp fallback

If YouTube refuses a stream (HTTP 403 or 400), or the built-in downloader can’t read a video’s formats, and yt-dlp is on PATH, that video is retried with yt-dlp and a notice is shown.

--youtube-backend	Behavior
auto (default)	Built-in downloader, falling back to yt-dlp
builtin	Built-in only; no fallback
yt-dlp	yt-dlp for every video

yt-dlp receives the same quality, audio-only, proxy, and speed-limit settings, plus any YouTube or Google cookies from --cookies or --cookies-from-browser.

Resuming

Interrupted streams resume after a retry or in a later run. Partial streams wait in a hidden .scraper-yt-* folder beside the output and are reused only if the video, format, size, and last-modified time still match. The folder is removed once the video is saved; delete leftover .scraper-yt-* folders to discard partial downloads you no longer want.