how to use ffmpeg to download youtube videos to mp3

The ffmpeg documentation does not tell us about a switch which would just output the audio parameters of the input file. Once you have downloaded the video, just for the sake of interest, lets find out the audio quality of this You Tube audio video.

If you are on a windows machine, you may use my VBScript program to download the video (download /ftp/ytdown.vbs, read how to use it here), or if you are on linux, you may use gawk program to download the video (download /ftp/get_youtube_vids.awk, read how to use it here).Īfter downloading the video, I ended up with a file named My_Chemical Romance-_Famous_Last_Words.flv. I found some music video clip ' My Chemical Romance - Famous Last Words' (). Lets choose a sample video which we will extract the audio track from.

If you are using linux operating system, you can get the ffmpeg tool as a package distribution) and open the ffmpeg documentation in another window. This is a guide that explains how to extract audio tracks from any videos, not just YouTube.įirst, lets download the ffmpeg tool (that's for Windows Operating System. How can we extract only the audio part and have it converted to a format like mp3?Īs I have written a few articles before on how to download YouTube videos with Perl, gawk and VBScript, and how to convert the downloaded flash video files (flv) to divx or xvid, or any other format with ffmpeg, it was very easy to help this guy. A few days ago my blog reader, Ankush Agarwal, on the comments of downloading youtube videos with gawk article asked: I've seen tools available to download just the audio from a youtube video, in various formats but as per your explanation it seems, that the audio is integrated with the video in the.

How to use ffmpeg to download youtube videos to mp3