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I'm trying to download a 4k video from youtube. For this, I used the command

youtube-dl -f best https://youtu.be/VcR5RCzWfeY

However, using this command only downloads the video in 720p. Manually specifying the resolution, however, seems to work:

youtube-dl  https://youtu.be/VcR5RCzWfeY -f 313+bestaudio

The documentation states that using nothing should download the best quality possible, but I always get the default quality of 720p. This tends to be an issue when I am downloading playlists with multiple file qualities. So what gives? Is there some other code I should be using?

Gyan
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bigboi
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    Does this answer your question? [youtube-dl DASH video and audio in highest quality without human intervention](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31631535/youtube-dl-dash-video-and-audio-in-highest-quality-without-human-intervention) – GSerg May 10 '20 at 15:32

1 Answers1

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youtube-dl downloads the best quality by default. (This may not be the highest resolution for all of the supported sites, but it tends to be that one for YouTube.)

-f best is not the default. It advises youtube-dl to download the best single file format. For many supported sites, the best single format will be the best overall, but that does not apply to YouTube.

To get the highest quality, simply run youtube-dl without any -f:

youtube-dl https://youtu.be/VcR5RCzWfeY

For your example video, this will produce an 7680x4320 video file weighing 957MB.

Note that this requires ffmpeg to be installed on your machine and available in your PATH (or specified with --ffmpeg-location). To find out which version of ffmpeg you have, type ffmpeg.