Sometimes I download a video or two from youtube or some other website to store it on my NAS for later.

Up till now I was using one of my computers to download and then send it via network to the NAS, but this process can be optimized to use NAS for everything.

At first I wanted to download 64-bit linux build of yt-dlp from GitHub, but when trying to run it I got some strange error about libpython3.10.so missing (although I had python 3.10 installed).

It seems that the more reasonable (and working) approach is to use pip and install yt-dlp with it.

You can install pip and yt-dlp when using Python 3.9 provided by Synology, however I had to run all the commands with sudo. Whenever I wanted to run yt-dlp, I also had to use sudo and it made me uncomfortable, fortunately using python provided by SynoCommunity solves this issue.

If you want to install SynoCommunity feed you have to follow this guide.

After that go to Package Center and click on Community - there are several python packages to choose from.

2023 12 08 synology yt dlp

Now ssh into Synology and start by installing pip, then installing yt-dlp.

I have installed python 3.10 from SynoCommunity and python 3.9 from Synology, so I have to specify the version I want to use:

python3.10 -m ensurepip

python3.10 -m pip install -U yt-dlp

If you use python provided by Synology and get an error, it means you have to use sudo.

If you use python provided by SynoCommunity, you will get a warning about bin folder not being included in your $PATH.

To fix that edit ~/.bashrc (if it doesn’t exist just create it)

nano -w ~/.bashrc

And add this line:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin

Close nano (by pressing CTRL+X, then Y to save the changes) and run the same command in the terminal:

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin

Now you can check if the $PATH has been updated by doing:

echo $PATH

And now it’s possible to run yt-dlp with:

yt-dlp

If you installed yt-dlp first with python from Synology and now with python from SynoCommunity, you should uninstall the previous yt-dlp installation by doing:

sudo python3 -m pip uninstall yt-dlp