YouTube Downloading

I’m looking for a free GUI that can download a YouTube channel in a particular language (i.e. Japanese) with it’s associated English subtitles preferably in SRT format.

I used 4K Video Downloader which worked fine for the “old” YT even though it was limited and I had to uninstall and reinstall a few times I got exactly what I wanted.

Then Google in all their stupidity decided to put all streams for a single video together so I can’t get what I want from 4K without downloading the video and then splitting the stream some way and downloading the Japanese audio to go with it.

Can anyone give me a simpler alternative to what I’m trying to do? I would appreciate any constructive input. Thanks!

bestusername,
@bestusername@aussie.zone avatar

I’ve been using Tartube for a few years, unsure of its subtitles capabilities, but it’s really feature packed and it wouldn’t surprise me if it can do you want.

x4740N,

Jdownloader2 can download subtitles but I can’t recall if you can configure it to download subtitle for a specific language

Rodrigo_de_Mendoza,

Yeah, I liked Jdownloader2 but I can do about the same with 4K Video Downloader plus it conflicted and corrupted my IDM installation so I had to remove both and reinstall IDM to get it back working. Lesson 1: you don’t install 2 downloaders. LOL

AernaLingus, (edited )

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp is gonna be the go-to tool for any YouTube downloading, but I don’t have much experience with frontends for it. I use Tartube for archiving channels, but it can be a bit byzantine and might be overkill for what you need–plus, there’s a decent chance you will need to manually enter some yt-dlp options anyway (although only during the setup process). That being said, it’s the only one I have experience with, so it’s the one I’ll recommend!

Couple of clarifying questions:

  1. When you say “download a YouTube channel in a particular language”, do you just mean a general monolingual channel (e.g. Masahiro Sakurai’s Japanese channel), or do you mean a channel that has videos with multiple audio tracks (such as this video with three different language tracks)? Both are doable, but I think you’ll need to add an actual command line flag for the latter whereas the former should be achievable pretty simply through Tartube’s GUI.
  2. Are the subtitles you’re talking about added by the uploader, or are they auto subs (in this case, auto subs that are auto translated)? Both are easily achievable through the GUI, just slightly different instructions for either one. Also, depending on the scope of things, the simplest approach might be to simply download all subtitles (may not want to do that for like a MrBeast video with a dozen subtitle tracks), which also sidesteps the possible issue where the language of tracks isn’t properly indicated by the uploader.
  3. When you say “put all streams for a single video together”, do you mean that you don’t want the video and audio tracks merged into a single file, or just that when you try to download the video you get a pre-merged file that doesn’t contain the tracks that you want? Was a little confused by this part.

I know you’re looking for a GUI solution, but while I wait for clarification I might as well drop a basic yt-dlp command to give you an idea of the parameters we’re dealing with (here I’m assuming separate audio tracks and uploader-added subs):

yt-dlp --format bv+ba[language=ja] --sub-langs en --write-subs --convert-subs srt --download-archive channel_archive.txt video_or_channel_url_goes_here

–format bv+ba[language=ja]: gets the “best” video track and Japanese audio track (for a 4K video yt-dlp prefers the VP9 encode, but if it’s a video with a lot of views there may also be an AV1 encode–if you want that AV1 encode you have to explicitly opt for it by using bv[vcodec^=av01] instead of plain bv)
–sub-langs en: downloads English subtitle(s)
–write-subs: write subs to an external file (as opposed to embedding them)
–convert-subs srt: converts subs to srt format, if possible
--download-archive channel_archive.txt: writes the IDs of successfully downloaded videos to the specified file channel_archive.txt. If you re-run this command, these videos will be automatically and very speedily skipped over without needing to fetch any additional information. Even without this option, yt-dlp is smart enough to skip over videos that have already been downloaded (assuming the output filenames will be the same), but it will go through the entire process of fetching all the video information for each video up to the point it is about to start downloading, which is a huge waste of time if you’re just updating a channel archive and need only the newest three videos.

Everything in that command (except for the audio track bit, to my knowledge) can be handled in the Tartube GUI in relatively simple fashion, provided you know which menus to dig into.

edit: forgot the URL in my command, kinda important!

Rodrigo_de_Mendoza,

Thanks for all the information!

4K Video Downloader can download the “old” format of YT videos where a channel is strictly a particular language and put it in an MKV container with the resolution I select & an SRT subtitle using a VP9 codec & that’s fine. I just run it through my video converter and I’m good. The problem is when I try to download from one of the “new” multi-audio/sub channels. (Ugh!)

Ok, so now let me see if I can answer your questions:
Q1 - Yes, I mean a channel with multiple audio tracks but I can only access the English version although I know there’s a Japanese track there also.
Q2 - The subtitle is the one you get by selecting CC on the YT control panel. I can see it with IDM but it’s in TIML format. 4K gives me a SRT on the “old” channels.
Q3 - Yes, when I download I want a pre-merged file with the appropriate streams (Video, Japanese Audio & English Subtitles) preferably with an SRT sub.

I hope that made sense. I’ve tried Tartube a bit but like you said it will still be the problem I run into with 4K Downloader, I can’t get the original Japanese audio. I can go to YouTube 4k Downloader and enter the URL for the file and download the Japanese audio and remux the file but when you’re talking about >100 files that’s a long process.

Again, thank you for the information and explantion of the command line. I’m not very good with command line stuff but I will try it and see if I can get it work for me. Please feel free to comment back.

SiriusCybernetics, (edited )

I use EDIT: jdownloader2 for YouTube video/audio. It may be more feature packed, but it’s easy enough once you’re comfortable with the GUI.

Rodrigo_de_Mendoza,

My antivirus flagged it as a virus (Potential Unwanted Program). Thank goodness it caught and quarantined it.

SiriusCybernetics, (edited )

Sorry about that, it’s some issue with adware in that version of the installer (that doesn’t have to be installed). Their forum has a post about this problem. I edited my reply to direct to the “adware free” installer: jdownloader.org/jdownloader2

Rodrigo_de_Mendoza,

Phew, that worked better. No virus that time. I’ll give it a try and see if it’ll work for me. I was getting a bit nervous there for a minute. Thank you for updating your information!

wildcardology,

JD2 can download from a whole lot of sources been using it for years.

Sir_Kevin,
@Sir_Kevin@lemmy.dbzer0.com avatar

No GUI but github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

It can download, mux the streams and I believe has options to select language.

jws_shadotak,

You can get a GUI with it if you host MeTube.

wraith,

Stacher is a great GUI for yt-dlp on Windows and MacOS.

FigMcLargeHuge,

yt-dlp -F {youtube url} - Will list the different streams for you, which you can then individually download with “-f {stream number}”. You can use ffmpeg to put them all back together after. I know op asked for gui, but I figured I would point out the command line options just in case it was helpful.

far_university1990,

yt-dlp can use ffmpeg automatically: „-f {number1}+{number2}“ will merge stream number1 and number2 into one file

tonyn,

I love yt-dlp, it’s so useful.

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