<story><title>Opus Audio Codec – FAQ</title><url>https://wiki.xiph.org/index.php?title=OpusFAQ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lozf</author><text>The &lt;i&gt;only point&lt;/i&gt; in lossy encoding is to &lt;i&gt;save space &amp;#x2F; bandwidth&lt;/i&gt;.  Opus excels at getting good sound quality at lower bitrates.&lt;p&gt;If there&amp;#x27;s a talk or lecture on Youtube that you&amp;#x27;re about to grab, try the 50kbps Opus version and save your limited space for more important things, but you might need to remux from webm to an ogg container for compatibility.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    e.g. youtube-dl -f249 $URL  --exec &amp;#x27;ffmpeg -i {} -vn -c:a copy {}.ogg&amp;#x27;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>8bitsrule</author><text>You can DL and listen to a longish YT track without the video - in far less time and with (usually) better audio - by specifying format 251 (usually available).&lt;p&gt;For example, an hour-long performance video mp4 at 1280x720 gets you 96k audio and 280MB. &amp;#x27;youtube-dl -f 251 url&amp;#x27; will get you a 160K Opus in 54 MB.&lt;p&gt;To my ears Opus sounds sweeter and fuller than mp3. At 64K and lower bit-rates, it&amp;#x27;s near the top.</text></comment>
<story><title>Opus Audio Codec – FAQ</title><url>https://wiki.xiph.org/index.php?title=OpusFAQ</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>lozf</author><text>The &lt;i&gt;only point&lt;/i&gt; in lossy encoding is to &lt;i&gt;save space &amp;#x2F; bandwidth&lt;/i&gt;.  Opus excels at getting good sound quality at lower bitrates.&lt;p&gt;If there&amp;#x27;s a talk or lecture on Youtube that you&amp;#x27;re about to grab, try the 50kbps Opus version and save your limited space for more important things, but you might need to remux from webm to an ogg container for compatibility.&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    e.g. youtube-dl -f249 $URL  --exec &amp;#x27;ffmpeg -i {} -vn -c:a copy {}.ogg&amp;#x27;&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>derf_</author><text>You can replace the --exec &amp;#x27;ffmpeg ...&amp;#x27; with just -x (or the long form --extract-audio).</text></comment>