How can I speed up my terminal downloads?

sofasurfer · 10-23-2021, 01:45 PM

I am using youtube-dl to download videos. It is extremely slow, about 49kb/sec. About 0.1% per 3 seconds. What is a good normal speed? How do I tell if I have a pc problem or a connection problem or a server problem?

I have some videos that downloaded at 4mb/sec but other download at 60kb/sec. Why the differance?

wpeckham · 10-23-2021, 04:51 PM

What is the speed of the ISP connection?
What is the speed and nature of your connection from your client to you gateway device? (router?)
Those things set the upper limit of possible speed. Generally your actual measured speed will never be that high.

boughtonp · 10-23-2021, 05:15 PM

It's not you, it's YouTube.

Workaround is to switch to yt-dlp where it has been patched.

(The youtube-dl maintainer is currently too busy, so no idea when it'll get fixed there.)

sofasurfer · 10-23-2021, 09:44 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by wpeckham

What is the speed of the ISP connection?
What is the speed and nature of your connection from your client to you gateway device? (router?)
Those things set the upper limit of possible speed. Generally your actual measured speed will never be that high.

I have cable connection with modem wired to computer. Providers speed test tells m I am downloading at 113mbps.

sofasurfer · 10-23-2021, 09:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by boughtonp

It's not you, it's YouTube.

Workaround is to switch to yt-dlp where it has been patched.

(The youtube-dl maintainer is currently too busy, so no idea when it'll get fixed there.)

Thanks for this info. I will try yt-dip.

jmgibson1981 · 10-23-2021, 09:46 PM

Downloading from YouTube is something they actively are trying to stop. The fact that you can at all surprises me. They will find a way to block or at least slow it to a crawl trying to make it not worth it.

enigma9o7 · 10-23-2021, 09:49 PM

boughtonp gave you the easy solution. Google has started throttling all the 3rd party youtube players - minitube, freetube, smtube, youtube-dl, etc, due to the way they request the video. That fork of youtube-dl works around the issue by pretending to be android (which apperantly is unaffected). Smart folks are working on calculating the "&n" value that will resolve this correctly.

For youtube-dl,that fork is direct replacement, I installed it and simlinked it to youtube-dl so don't have to think (and so smtube works automatically). For freetube change the api to invidious which has it resolved, until the internal stuff is updated. Minitube still not working for me (built 3.9.1 from source) but author claims he's fixed it in external java-something, dunno, for now I'm avoiding that app, although if I must use it, setting to 480p works. Any of these apps same thing, 480p is fine, 720p+ throttled.

rkelsen · 10-24-2021, 05:55 AM

Use clipgrab: https://clipgrab.org

They regularly update it, and it's usually at least one step ahead.

boughtonp · 10-24-2021, 07:54 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by enigma9o7

For youtube-dl,that fork is direct replacement, I installed it and simlinked it to youtube-dl so don't have to think

That depends on your definition of "direct" - some may find it necessary to use "--compat-options youtube-dl" to reverse certain changes.

Quote:

Originally Posted by yt-dlp --help

--compat-options OPTS Options that can help keep compatibility
with youtube-dl or youtube-dlc
configurations by reverting some of the
changes made in yt-dlp. See "Differences in
default behavior" for details

Where "Differences in default behaviour" is not in the help output, but is in the readme - the below quote lists only some of the differences:

Quote:

Originally Posted by https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp#differences-in-default-behavior

Some of yt-dlp's default options are different from that of youtube-dl and youtube-dlc.
...
The default output template is %(title)s [%(id)s].%(ext)s. There is no real reason for this change. This was changed before yt-dlp was ever made public and now there are no plans to change it back to %(title)s-%(id)s.%(ext)s. Instead, you may use --compat-options filename
The default format sorting is different from youtube-dl and prefers higher resolution and better codecs rather than higher bitrates. You can use the --format-sort option to change this to any order you prefer, or use --compat-options format-sort to use youtube-dl's sorting order
...
--ignore-errors is enabled by default. Use --abort-on-error or --compat-options abort-on-error to abort on errors instead
...
The output of -F is listed in a new format. Use --compat-options list-formats to revert this
...
Youtube live chat (if available) is considered as a subtitle. Use --sub-langs all,-live_chat to download all subtitles except live chat. You can also use --compat-options no-live-chat to prevent live chat from downloading
...

Anyone with scripts or a particular workflow will want to investigate all the changes to determine if they are worth changing their process vs using compat-options.