However, some browsers are much better than others. No text-mode browser can compare to a graphical one in terms of advanced layout features, of course – so don't expect a web page's fancy CSS animations and floating div prettiness to shine through inside a terminal window. There are many text-mode web browsers out there, and performance and layout differ significantly. For full details on all the options, check out the program's documentation. You can even create templates for output file names – that's especially useful if you want to create compilations of music, for instance. There are many other options in youtube-dl for logging into video sites before downloading, performing post-processing on audio or video (e.g., recoding in a different format), and much more. You can then repeat the command, specifying the appropriate number after the -f parameter: youtube-dl -f 32 With this, youtube-dl probes YouTube to find out which formats are available for the specified video and then lists them with numbers. To achieve this, add the -list-formats parameter: youtube-dl -list-formats However, you'll probably want some more control over the exact format of the file that you're downloading. Then, you can download a video by providing the URL, for example: youtube-dl The program is available in the package repositories of most popular Linux distros – if you can't find it, though, or you want the very latest version, you can get it from the youtube-dl website. This lets you specify a YouTube URL and then grab the video data for offline use it also works with many other video-hosting websites, such as Dailymotion, Streamable, and LiveLeak. A more elegant (and Linux-y) way is to use a command-line tool: youtube-dl. So, let's get started.Įver seen a YouTube video that you'd like to keep permanently on your hard drive? Copyright issues aside, there are browser extensions that provide extra links – but often these extensions are bundled with adware or malware. And, of course, browsing the web from the command line wins you oodles of geek points as well. This may be useful in scenarios such as the one I described moreover, these techniques could come in useful if you're logged in to a remote server and need to do some browsing from there (e.g., to download something) or even want to watch a video (see the "YouTube from the Command Line" box for details). So, in this tutorial, we're going to look at some ways to navigate the web and grab content at the command line. Because no images were involved, everything ran buttery smooth. The actual job of browsing was being done on the Pi, so only the screen changes were being sent over the SSH connection to my laptop – and those required hardly any bandwidth. Yes, thanks to a couple of rather excellent text-mode browsers, I was soon browsing Reddit threads and Wikipedia pages at lightning speed, despite my terrible connection. And then it struck me: I could SSH into a Raspberry Pi I have at home and browse from there. I tried disabling images and JavaScript in Firefox this resulted in a slight improvement, but browsing was still agonizingly slow. Somehow, I needed to drastically reduce my bandwidth but still be able to surf the web. They soon gave up.īecause I'm a turbo-geek, though, I came up with a solution. I pretty much couldn't do anything on the Internet, and I saw other grumbling passengers desperately trying to reconnect multiple times in hope of a teensy bit of better bandwidth. I'm talking horrendously slow here – it was like using some 300-baud modem from the 1980s. But there was one big problem: The airport's Internet connection was slow. Fortunately, it was past beer-o-clock (i.e., 1800 hours), so I headed to the bar and then cracked open my laptop for some Reddit-browsing antics. A few months ago, I was stranded at an airport – my plane was delayed, so I had a couple of hours to kill.
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