+
+
+FORMAT SELECTION
+
+
+By default youtube-dl tries to download the best quality, but sometimes
+you may want to download in a different format. The simplest case is
+requesting a specific format, for example -f 22. You can get the list of
+available formats using --list-formats, you can also use a file
+extension (currently it supports aac, m4a, mp3, mp4, ogg, wav, webm) or
+the special names best, bestvideo, bestaudio and worst.
+
+If you want to download multiple videos and they don't have the same
+formats available, you can specify the order of preference using
+slashes, as in -f 22/17/18. You can also filter the video results by
+putting a condition in brackets, as in -f "best[height=720]" (or
+-f "[filesize>10M]"). This works for filesize, height, width, tbr, abr,
+vbr, asr, and fps and the comparisons <, <=, >, >=, =, != and for ext,
+acodec, vcodec, container, and protocol and the comparisons =, != .
+Formats for which the value is not known are excluded unless you put a
+question mark (?) after the operator. You can combine format filters, so
+-f "[height <=? 720][tbr>500]" selects up to 720p videos (or videos
+where the height is not known) with a bitrate of at least 500 KBit/s.
+Use commas to download multiple formats, such as
+-f 136/137/mp4/bestvideo,140/m4a/bestaudio. You can merge the video and
+audio of two formats into a single file using
+-f <video-format>+<audio-format> (requires ffmpeg or avconv), for
+example -f bestvideo+bestaudio. Format selectors can also be grouped
+using parentheses, for example if you want to download the best mp4 and
+webm formats with a height lower than 480 you can use
+-f '(mp4,webm)[height<480]'.
+
+Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses
+-f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as default format selection (see #5447,
+#5456). If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading
+bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a
+single file giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it
+falls back to best and results in downloading the best available quality
+served as a single file. best is also needed for videos that don't come
+from YouTube because they don't provide the audio and video in two
+different files. If you want to only download some dash formats (for
+example if you are not interested in getting videos with a resolution
+higher than 1080p), you can add
+-f bestvideo[height<=?1080]+bestaudio/best to your configuration file.
+Note that if you use youtube-dl to stream to stdout (and most likely to
+pipe it to your media player then), i.e. you explicitly specify output
+template as -o -, youtube-dl still uses -f best format selection in
+order to start content delivery immediately to your player and not to
+wait until bestvideo and bestaudio are downloaded and muxed.
+
+If you want to preserve the old format selection behavior (prior to
+youtube-dl 2015.04.26), i.e. you want to download the best available
+quality media served as a single file, you should explicitly specify
+your choice with -f best. You may want to add it to the configuration
+file in order not to type it every time you run youtube-dl.
+
+
+
Rapsys Git / youtubedl / blobdiff