Downloading videos to an external drive with youtube-dl

My Hard drive has very little free space left. Thus I am trying to get youtube-dl to save the videos onto my external drive. With no luck, so far. Has anyone tried that? Or any ideas on how to proceed? I am new to linux and my interactions with the command prompt can be found below.

me@mycomputer:/$ youtube-dl -o 'media/New Volume/Youtube Downloads' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=123456789
me@mycomputer:/$ youtube-dl -o '/media/New\ Volume/Youtube\ Downloads' http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=123456789

I thought that would save the videos on the external drive, but instead the things are getting saved in my home folder under ~/media/New Volume/Youtube Downloads. Any help is welcome!

Solution 1:

How about:

cd '/media/New Volume/Youtube Downloads'
youtube-dl URL1...
youtube-dl URL2...

...

Solution 2:

All of these work for me when run from /home/vasa1. I don't have to first cd to the target folder (or drive):

• youtube-dl -o "/media/vasa1/TOSHIBA EXT/%(title)s" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc (an external USB drive)

• youtube-dl -o "/media/vasa1/EC82B9BF82B98E98/%(title)s" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc (an NTFS partition on the internal hard disk)

• youtube-dl -o "/home/vasa1/Downloads/%(title)s" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OqxLmLUT-qc

  ---

  I suggest you run youtube-dl --version and then look for your version here: https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/tree/. When you click on your version from the list, you'll be taken to a page that has a detailed section on usage.

Solution 3:

This simple function would save "Nyan Cat 10 hours (original).mp4" from YouTube in the Videos folder:

video(){  
    youtube-dl -o "/Users/daniel/Videos/%(title)s.%(ext)s" $1 -f mp4  
}

Usage from your terminal:

video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZZ7oFKsKzY