Speed up your media archiving by learning how to implement techniques. While the original youtube-dl downloads videos sequentially by default, several workarounds and modern successors can drastically reduce wait times. 1. Upgrade to yt-dlp (The Recommended Path)
If you have a list of URLs in a text file (e.g., urls.txt ), the most powerful way to achieve true parallel downloading is by using the xargs command. xargs -n 1 -P 5 youtube-dl < urls.txt Use code with caution. : Passes one URL at a time to the command. -P 5 : Runs up to 5 instances of youtube-dl in parallel. youtube-dl parallel download
Most users looking for parallel downloads should first switch to yt-dlp, a modern fork that is significantly faster and actively maintained. Speed up your media archiving by learning how
: You can download multiple parts of a single video simultaneously using the -N flag. yt-dlp -N 10 [VIDEO_URL] Use code with caution. Upgrade to yt-dlp (The Recommended Path) If you
This uses 10 threads to pull segments of a high-resolution video at once.
: This method can be up to 10x faster than sequential downloads, as demonstrated in benchmarks where 10 videos were pulled in 35 seconds compared to over 3 minutes sequentially. 3. Use GNU Parallel for Advanced Queuing