In this article, we will go through the steps to install ClipGrab to download YouTube videos on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. ClipGrab is a free downloader and converter not for just YouTube but also for Vimeo, Facebook and many other online video sites. You can download high quality videos with just click of a button. You can also convert videos to MPEG4, MP3 and other available formats. ClipGrab is available on almost all kind of platforms. Here we will see the steps to install on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS based Systems.

How to Install ClipGrab to download YouTube Videos on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS

Also Read: How to Install CopyQ on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS [Step by Step]

Step 1: Prerequisites

a) You should have a running Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Server.

b) You should have sudo or root access to run privileged commands.

c) You should have apt or apt-get utility available in your System.

 

Step 2: Update Your Server

Like always, we need to first check for any recent available updates on all the configured and enabled repositories using apt update or apt-get update command.

root@localhost:~# apt update
Hit:1 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal InRelease
Get:2 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates InRelease [114 kB]
Get:3 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-backports InRelease [108 kB]
Get:4 http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-security InRelease [114 kB]
Get:5 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 Packages [1,392 kB]
Hit:6 https://dl.google.com/linux/chrome/deb stable InRelease
Hit:7 https://artifacts.elastic.co/packages/oss-7.x/apt stable InRelease
Get:8 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/main i386 Packages [572 kB]
Get:9 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/main amd64 DEP-11 Metadata [278 kB]
Get:10 http://in.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu focal-updates/universe i386 Packages [652 kB]

 

Step 3: Install ffmpeg

ClipGrab requires you to install either ffmpeg or avconv to support converting and downloading of 1080p videos from YouTube. So here we are installing ffmpeg using apt-get install ffmpeg command as shown below. If you try to open ClipGrab without installing ffmpeg or avconv then you will get a notification saying No installed version of avconv or ffmpeg could be found.

root@localhost:~# apt-get install ffmpeg
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
The following packages were automatically installed and are no longer required:
libllvm11 libtie-ixhash-perl libxml-xpathengine-perl
Use 'apt autoremove' to remove them.
The following additional packages will be installed:
i965-va-driver intel-media-va-driver libaacs0 libaom0 libass9 libavcodec58 libavdevice58 libavfilter7 libavformat58 libavresample4 libavutil56 libbdplus0
libbluray2 libbs2b0 libchromaprint1 libcodec2-0.9 libdc1394-22 libfftw3-double3 libflite1 libgme0 libgsm1 libigdgmm11 liblilv-0-0 libmysofa1 libnorm1
libopenal-data libopenal1 libopenmpt0 libpgm-5.2-0 libpostproc55 librubberband2 libsdl2-2.0-0 libserd-0-0 libshine3 libsnappy1v5 libsndio7.0 libsord-0-0
libsratom-0-0 libssh-gcrypt-4 libswresample3 libswscale5 libva-drm2 libva-x11-2 libva2 libvdpau1 libvidstab1.1 libx264-155 libx265-179 libxvidcore4
libzmq5 libzvbi-common libzvbi0 mesa-va-drivers mesa-vdpau-drivers ocl-icd-libopencl1 va-driver-all vdpau-driver-all

 

Step 4: Download ClipGrab

Since it is an open source project, you can take the source code and compile for your System if you choose to install this way or you can also use the pre-compiled one. Here we are going to download and use the pre-compiled package. You can visit the ClipGrab Official website and download the latest pre-compiled binary for Linux using wget utility as shown below. This will download the package in current path.

root@localhost:~# wget https://download.clipgrab.org/ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage
--2021-12-11 22:23:55-- https://download.clipgrab.org/ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage
Resolving download.clipgrab.org (download.clipgrab.org)... 2a00:1158:300::63c, 134.119.253.60
Connecting to download.clipgrab.org (download.clipgrab.org)|2a00:1158:300::63c|:443... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 95801032 (91M)
Saving to: ‘ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage’

ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage 100%[============================================================================>] 91.36M 3.52MB/s in 19s

2021-12-11 22:24:14 (4.93 MB/s) - ‘ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage’ saved [95801032/95801032]

 

Step 5: Add Execute Permission

To make it executable you need to assign execute permission using chmod +x ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage command as shown below.

root@localhost:~# chmod +x ClipGrab-3.9.7-x86_64.AppImage

 

Step 6: Install ClipGrab

When we say Install ClipGrab here, it really does not mean that we are going to install ClipGrab package as it is a pre-compiled one so it does not need to be installed here.

a) Open ClipGrab

Now you can go to the path where you have downloaded the pre-compiled package and just double click on it to Start.

b) Download youtube-dlp

Once it starts, it will give you a dialog box asking to download youtube-dlp in order to download videos from the Internet. So you just to click on Continue to proceed with the download.

 

Step 7: Download Video

Once youtube-dlp is downloaded, ClipGrab is now ready to download YouTube Videos. You can either search the video in Search tab or you can directly go to Downloads tab and provide the URL of the Video that needs to be downloaded and then Click Enter.

It will then ask you to choose the location and name of the video file to save. For example, here we are choosing /u01 location to save all our downloaded video files and provided the name of the video as Solar-flare.mp4 as you can see below. Once done click on Save.

After clicking on save, it will start downloading like below. Similarly you can download videos from other sites as well. That's it !!