---
title: one liner to get youtube info
subtitle: Never Gonna Give You Up
date: 2023-01-21
keywords: [youtube, youtubedl, jq, shell, bash]
---

It's a work in progress, but this will grab info about a youtube video
and spit out some json.

Requires [youtube-dl], [jq] and [jq-duration] (for changing duration
from seconds to something more human readable).

Swap the ID `$i` for either the ID or full URL of the video as
needed.

``` bash
youtube-dl -j $i | jq 'include "duration"; { "title": .title, "duration": (.duration|duration(2)), "url": .webpage_url, "channel": .channel, "channel_url": .channel_url }'
```

The above produces something like this:

``` json
{
  "title": "Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up (Official Music Video)",
  "duration": "3m 32s",
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ",
  "channel": "Rick Astley",
  "channel_url": "https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuAXFkgsw1L7xaCfnd5JJOw"
}
```

I made a [jinja] template to make markdown text to use with the above :

``` markdown
* [{{ title }}]({{ url }}) ({{ duration }}) from [{{ channel }}]({{ channel_url }})
```

To use this, put the above in a file called (eg `yt2md.j2`) and call it
by appending `| jinja2 yt2md.j2 -` to the `youtube-dl` command.

(*note:* the `-` appended to the end is required to get around a jinja2 cli bug)

The full command will then look like:

``` bash
youtube-dl -j $i | jq 'include "duration"; { "title": .title, "duration": (.duration|duration(2)), "url": .webpage_url, "channel": .channel, "channel_url": .channel_url }' | jinja2 yt2md.j2 -
```

[youtube-dl]: https://youtube-dl.org
[jq]: https://stedolan.github.io/jq/
[jq-duration]: https://github.com/fearphage/jq-duration
[jinja]: https://jinja.palletsprojects.com/en/3.1.x/