youtube download link description-title

Question

I'm pasting a lot of youtube links in my org-mode files. My procedure is - copy link from youtube and then manually copy the title of the video. I was thinking is this can be automated - just paste link & description will be downloaded.

Answer 1

You can use youtube-dl for this. For example:

(defun insert-youtube-link ()
  (interactive)
  (let* ((link (read-from-minibuffer "Youtube-Link:"))
         (title (shell-command-to-string (format "youtube-dl --get-title '%s' 2>/dev/null" link)))
         (description (shell-command-to-string (format "youtube-dl --get-description '%s' 2>/dev/null" link))))
    (save-excursion
      (insert (format "[[%s][%s]]" link title))
      (forward-line 1)
      (insert (format "Description: %s" description)))))))    

You may add some error handling and maybe make the code clearer, but this should work.