yt-dlp
Feature-rich command-line tool for downloading video and audio from YouTube and thousands of other sites
Visit yt-dlp →yt-dlp is a community-maintained fork of youtube-dl, grown well past its origins into support for thousands of sites beyond YouTube — with format selection, subtitle downloads, playlist handling, and post-processing (audio extraction, format conversion via ffmpeg) built in as command-line flags rather than requiring separate tools.
It’s a common building block in other Python projects that need to fetch video/audio programmatically — imported as a library, not just run as a standalone CLI — thanks to an actively maintained extractor list that keeps pace with sites changing their internals far faster than most alternatives.