How can i download poor quality audio from youtube videos?

Question

I stay in a underdeveloped area of India where only one telecom operator is available. The highest internet speed that I have seen in my computer is 11 KBps (as this operator supports only 2G).

there are some of discussions/debates on youtube, which are worth watching, but due to my internet speed I can't even afford to download and listen to the audio of these videos. The reason being that the audio of these videos are of almost 200 MB.(which would theoretically take 5 hours and 17 minutes to get downloaded)

The bitrate which is offered by many of the websites like

youtube2mp3[dot]net

listentoyoutube[dot]com

keepvid[dot]com

youtube-mp3[dot]org

is much more than i want(they are offering 256kbps and I need much lower!!!). The bitrate definitely add to the memory of the audio clip.

I want a software by which I can download the audio of the youtube videos at a bitrate, lower than 20kbps. (as I have to listen only to the conversation of people, and any audio which is audible is acceptable)

I shall be highly thankful...eagerly waiting for reply.

Answer 1

According to wikipedia, the lowest-bit rate audio available on youtube is 24 kbit/s (just tested it, and it's surprisingly OK quality -- definitely enough to listen to the spoken word). This may or may not be available on all youtube videos.

Unfortunately, the websites you listed there are all taking the youtube videos, turning them into MP3s, and then sending you the copy of that MP3. An MP3 would be too horrible to listen to at such low bit rates, so the way those particular websites work will never get you the low bit rates you want.

If you are comfortable working on the command-line, you could perhaps give youtube-dl a try. You would want to use something like:

youtube-dl -f 17 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLKNc778hoA

The -f 17 tells youtube-dl to get the mobile-phone version of the video, with an audio bit rate of 24 kbit/s and a video bit rate of around 50 kbit/s -- so, a total of around 74 kbit/s. It is not possible to avoid downloading the video as well as the audio with this method, I'm afraid, but it will still give you a smaller download than the websites you've tried.

I've found one website that allows you to download audio from youtube videos at 32 kbit/s. Not quite as low as you asked for, but hopefully you'll find it helpful. Obviously, use it at your own risk.