Follow that link, scroll down to the bottom section, and click the link for ffmpeg.

Download ffmpeg from this GitHub page.

Run the command pip install youtube-dl to install the youtube-dl package.

Once ffmpeg has been installed, youtube-dl works great in a-Shell on the iPad. I highly recommend watching the video, but I’m going to list the steps below. That was the missing piece in my previous attempts. Everything came together, though, when I found this YouTube video explaining how to install ffmpeg in a-Shell.

I’d heard about this app before in the context of youtube-dl-I think on an episode of the Adapt podcast-but I was never able to get it to work.

The answer lies with another command-line app for the iPad: a-Shell. I was close to giving up, but one last search last weekend proved to be unexpectedly fruitful.

Maybe that’s because I’m a command-line novice, but whatever the cause was, this was no longer working for me. During its beta period, the iOS/iPadOS app iSH Shell handled youtube-dl fine, but following its public, non-beta release and the removal and subsequent reinstatement of youtube-dl from GitHub, I couldn’t get iSH Shell to work properly. The problem is, the iPad doesn’t ship with a Terminal app like the Mac does, so while I could do this on my Mac, I struggled to find a way to use this command on my iPad. There is a command-line program you can run called youtube-dl that will download videos from YouTube (and other sites). I discovered that it’s possible to download these videos using the iCab browser if you change the user agent, but I could never get this to work consistently. There are various apps for the Mac that’ll download YouTube videos, but there’s nothing comparable for the iPad. I record, edit, and publish this podcast entirely on my iPad (except for those rare occasions when the episode is an interview), and it’s been a challenge to figure out how to extract the audio from these kids’ videos, which are almost always hosted on YouTube or Vimeo.

Whenever one of the featured children has a video posted on our site, I try to include an audio snippet of the child talking or, as in the case of one little boy, jamming on his toy guitar. As part of my work advocating for special-needs orphans, I produce a (mostly) weekly podcast highlighting several of the children on our website.

Youtube dl how to install ffmpeg