Install Youtube-dl the proper way

You maybe experiencing update problem and see this error:

It looks like you installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball. Please use that to update.

We have to install youtube-dl the proper way.

First you have to uninstall:

sudo apt-get remove -y youtube-dl

Install youtube-dl

sudo curl -L https://yt-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl -o /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

sudo chmod a+rx /usr/local/bin/youtube-dl

hash -r

If you have experiencing this error:

ERROR: YouTube said: Invalid parameters.

It looks like you installed youtube-dl with a package manager, pip, setup.py or a tarball. Please use that to update.

You have to update youtube-dl this way:

sudo youtube-dl -U

If the problem still exist, maybe we have to wait for the update.

ERROR: /usr/bin/env ‘python’ no such file or directory youtube-dl

If you are using Ubuntu 20.04, usually, Python is already installed. To check:

python -v


#it shows: Python 3.8.5

If python is installed, run this:

whereis python3


#it shows: python3: /usr/bin/python3.8 /usr/bin/python3.8-config /usr/bin/python3 /usr/lib/python3.8 /usr/lib/python3.9 /usr/lib/python3 /etc/python3.8 /etc/python3 /usr/local/lib/python3.8 /usr/include/python3.8 /usr/share/python3 /usr/share/man/man1/python3.1.gz

Finally, create a symlink:

sudo ln -s /usr/bin/python3 /usr/bin/python

This should work.