How can I update youtube-dl?

Solution 1:

For Ubuntu 20.04+ (Python 3 being the default Python) try:

pip3 install --upgrade youtube-dl

If you are using an older version of Ubuntu, or specifically want to use Python2, try:

pip install --upgrade youtube-dl

Note: this assumes you have pip or pip3 installed. Avoid using sudo pip3 (use virtualenv instead).

Using pip is a way to install youtube-dl, as reported on the official youtube-dl website, and the --upgrade option makes sure you end up with the latest available version installed.

To find out where youtube-dl has been installed, you can use the pip3 show youtube-dl command (see here and here).

Solution 2:

On 13.10, I installed youtube-dl from: http://rg3.github.io/youtube-dl/download.html because youtube-dl installed via sudo apt-get install didn't seem to allow sudo youtube-dl -U.

To get youtube-dl from source:

wget -O - https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl | sudo tee /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl >/dev/null
sudo chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

Now, sudo youtube-dl -U works without problems and I currently see:

$ youtube-dl --version
2015.02.23

Solution 3:

Try ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8. I do get upgrades every couple of days and I think, according to the message You get, that it should solve/answer Your question. If You did an upgrade from 13.04 to 13.10 You might have forgot (I guess) to update sources-list.d folder, for example, if You used WebUpd8 before.

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:nilarimogard/webupd8
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install youtube-dl