OT Question on audio downloads from youtube

[Budge]

On 23/09/2020 10:51, VeniVidiVideo wrote:
> On Sep 22, 2020, at 12:20 PM, Jim web <web at audiomisc.co.uk> wrote:
>> I've never looked at uploading anything for YT. The question in my mind is
>> as follows:
>>
>> Yes, it generally offers a range of download formats. But what format was
>> *uploaded* in the first place? I wonder if getting the 'best' audio from YT
>> simply may mean the least harm from a transcode YT has done.  Or are
>> uploaders expected to provide multiple versions? I suspect not.
>>
>> If my suspicion is correct, the 'best' would be to find the version as
>> uploaded, I assume.
> 
> That's incorrect.  Especially since youtube-dl targets YouTube, there are usually multiple versions available to be downloaded.  YouTube routinely maintains multiple resolutions of the video at least.  There may be multiple bitrates or formats for the audio as well, but I'm not sure about that.  The uploader doesn't have to worry about the multiple video resolutions.  YouTube takes care of the downcovert automatically.  They do that so people can stream videos with very different bandwidths, from 3G phone connections to Gigabit fiber connections.
> 
> youtube-dl even offers a -f "bestvideo+bestaudio" option that will separately download the highest quality video and the highest quality audio and combine them.  I don't use youtube-dl all that often, but when I do I typically use something like this:
> 
> youtube-dl -f "bestvideo+bestaudio/best" --merge-output-format "mkv" --prefer-ffmpeg --sub-lang 'en' --write-sub --convert-subtitles 'srt' --embed-subs -o "Output File" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxxxxxxx
> 
> Actually, I define most of those in ~/.config/youtube-dl/config, so the actual command can look like just
> 
> youtube-dl -o "Output File" http://...
> 
> But those are the options that yield the best quality all around from YouTube using youtube-dl.
> 
> -vvv
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So all is now OK for audio.  I have settled on the most appropriate approach for my purposes and have been able to download and save the missing tracks I was looking for so many thanks for all the guidance and supporting info from everybody.  

By way of a footnote in my search I found some beautiful videos of Bach Cantatas from the J.S. Bach Foundation which I was able to watch on TV with audio through fibre to my amplifier/speaker system.  So pleased was I that I thought I would go for a video download and this worked OK until YouTube stopped me.  I must have exceeded some limit but it was good while it lasted!   

Budge