Downloads from Terminal: ydl

József Schaffer · Originally published 8 April 2026 · Updated 19 May 2026

I built a small wrapper around yt-dlp to make it easier to use. Enter ydl, my macOS-friendly downloader. It takes the URL from your clipboard, or even multiple URLs, such as a YouTube link, and downloads the best available version.

The project lives on GitHub, but installing it on any Mac is simple: just run this command in Terminal.

/bin/zsh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/angelday/ydl/main/install.zsh)"

This takes care of everything: it installs the dependencies, copies the script to its final location, and makes it executable. You can just re-run the command to update it. There is no package manager yet.

ydl in action batch downloading and converting a VP9 video

Usage: open Terminal, navigate to the folder where you want the download to go, and run ydl. It will download the video from whatever URL is on your clipboard. You can also pass a text file, and it will intelligently retrieve the URLs one by one. If something is not in an Apple-friendly format, such as a VP9 video, it will re-encode it to MP4 so Quick Look can play it, icons show the correct preview, and so on.

Why not just use yt-dlp directly? Because ydl always tries to download the highest-quality Mac-friendly version, and it also gives you a very simple front end for everyday use.

Here is the full command help:

jozsi@jozsimini Sites % ydl -h
ydl 1.4
Usage: ydl [-v] [-c [browser]] ['URL or text with URLs'] [extra yt-dlp args...]

Downloads the best available video using yt-dlp, preferring H.264/H.265.
Torrent URLs are fetched with browser cookies and downloaded with transmission-cli.
If no input is given, reads URLs from clipboard text.
If input contains multiple URLs, downloads them one by one.
Videos outside Apple-friendly H.264/H.265 are converted to H.264 MP4.

URL should be wrapped in quotes to avoid shell interpretation.
Accepted URL schemes: http, https, ftp.

Options:
  -c [browser]   Use cookies from browser (default: safari)
  -v, --verbose  Show raw yt-dlp and ffmpeg output
  -h, --help     Show this help

Enjoy!

Changelog

See full changelog for details.