How does one use yt-dlp to download *only* the comments to a YouTube video, without the actual video?
After searching for such a thing for a long time, I've just discovered that yt-dlp, which I already have installed and use daily to download YouTube (and other) videos, supports fetching the user comments and saving them as a JSON file.
But, frustratingly, I cannot find any option to only do that, and not also download the video at the same time. How is that done? Is it even possible? If not, that's such a shame, since this is an amazing "stand-alone" feature which I often want to do without having to also download the massive video file. It's near-impossible to implement myself because YouTube makes it extremely difficult and convoluted to stop bots/automation.
I've looked at this manual for a long time now:
12 Answers
I have also looked at the documentation of yt-dlp, and it doesn't seem to have an option for downloading only the comments. You could suggest this feature to the developer.
If you're into programming, you could use theYouTube Data APIto get the comments yourself.
The articleExtracting & Pre-processing the YouTube Commentscontains detailed explanations as well as Python code to extract the comments and write them out as a CSV file. It also contains advice on cleaning out redundant characters such as emojis and language detection (if you want only English comments).
1yt-dlp has an option called --skip-download which seems to work for me. Here's the relevant part of the documentation:
--skip-download Do not download the video but write all related files (Alias: --no-download)
