How to Download a List of Videos with A Specific Format and Quality

Steps:

  • Put the links in a file like list.txt
  • Pick one of the links and list its formats: 
    yt-dlp --skip-download --list-formats  "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SomeVideo"

    You will see the list of formats. For example, 1920x1080 video format is 399 and mp4 audio format is 140. So, we will specify 399+140 as format to download.

  • Run the following loop over the videos in the list: 
    for file in $(cat list.txt); do yt-dlp  -f bestvideo+bestaudio  --merge-output-format mp4 --format 399+140   "$file"; done

399 refers to This works for YouTube, but you might be able to use it with other video hosting services as well.

Download a playlist

You can also download a playlist with a similar method. For example, the following command downloads a complete YT playlist and saves them as mp4 files. Note that it also specifies formats with 480p resolution to be downloaded.

yt-dlp -S "+height:480" -f "bv" --merge-output-format mp4 "https://example.com/playlist"

Further reading

yt-dlp GitHub page