Today I am going to show you how to download a youtube video completely remotely to your machine. Which means, the downloader itself will run on Qnap. In my scenario I wanted to give a list of videos Qnap from my workplace, and let Qnap do the rest of the job. The computer didn’t have to be left on to do this. Much like download station for youtube.
( NOTE : Folks at Qnap have developed a nice extension for Chrome called happyget that lets you download youtube videos to your Qnap machine. However to use Happyget you have to have chrome running. You close chrome and the downloading stops. My approach is to let Qnap download the video. )
We will use Ricardo Garcia’s youtube-dl script that gives you a command line option to download your videos . You give it a url and it will download the video for you. It can even grab a bunch of videos for you if you specify a batch file
1. Install Python on Qnap using Qpkg manager.
Since youtube-dl is written in python, you are going to need it. This is not a problem, as QPKG manager offers you single click installation. You will find it under miscellaneous section
If you don’t see a link to download python, you can download Qpkg for arm from here and intel from here.
2. Login to your Qnap using SSH. Download youtube-dl in a directory on Qnap and chmod the script to 755. I use Putty to login remotely to my Qnap box.
3. run the script by giving it a youtube url. I use -t option so it saves the file with title name in it. For Example, I use
./youtube-dl -t www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyI3dXIPCYM
and it starts
Setting language
UyI3dXIPCYM: Downloading video webpage
UyI3dXIPCYM: Downloading video info webpage
UyI3dXIPCYM: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: Jingle Bells – Mother Goose Club Holiday Christmas Songs-UyI3dXIPCYM.mp4
[download] 0.0% of 18.93M at 1.96M/s ETA 00:10
you can even specify a batch file with a few URLs in it and youtube-dl will download them one by one for you, that’s what I use most of the times. An Excellent tool indeed.