YTarchive (For YouTube streams)

You can Download YTarchive from here: https://github.com/Kethsar/ytarchive

Mega mirror of ytarchive:https://mega.nz/file/JdwgVLKA#1vWcNPm1SziR60LFBe5WnxeYEza0gBOvem5J2FuxIak

You also need to have FFmpeg installed, here's a short video as to how to install FFmpeg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r1AtmY-RMyQ
--- Mirror of the video: Catbox /// Mega

Installing

After downloading yt-archive, simply make a seperate folder in the same folder you installed FFmpeg into (in my case I installed it into C:/) and make a seperate folder. In this case, it's called 'yt archive':

Place the ytarchive.exe file there (This is also where you place the cookies.txt file that you need to record age restricted and membership YouTube live streams - more about that at the end of this section):

Running

After you installed it you can simply open ytarchive by opening a command line window. You can simply do that by using the windows key + r, then typing cmd, and hitting enter. This opens a command line window into which you type:

cd C:\ffmpeg\yt archive

To open ytarchive in a command line window:

After you do this, you can input your options of what you want to do with it As an example, to start archiving a YouTube stream, you simply use the following command:

ytarchive https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKjKUSZHrcA best

and it starts downloading the stream:

If the stream didn't start yet, or is scheduled to start at a later date, you can poll for a stream (meaning it basically checks if the channel goes live and if it does it starts the recording):

Here is an easy to understand example as how to make an command for ytarchive yourself:

ytarchive [insert option here] [Insert YouTube URL here] [Insert the desired quality here]

ytarchive --retry-stream 60 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K--bc2nM-JM 1080p

In this example, as an option, I chose the "--retry stream 60". As for the URL, this should be self explanatory, and for the quality i've used 1080p.

The Available video qualities for ytarchive are the following: audio_only, 144p, 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 720p60, 1080p, 1080p60, 1440p, 1440p60, 2160p, 2160p60, best

As for the available options, it would take too much space to put them all into this guide. Here's the link to the github page of ytarchive, with all options listed:

https://github.com/Kethsar/ytarchive
Mirror of the options: Pastebin

Using Cookies

To Download membership or age restricted streams you need to feed yt archive your cookies you can get the cookies.txt file with the following browser extensions (put the cookies.txt file into the directory where you have yt archive installed as i've described in the beginning of this section):

Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/get-cookiestxt/bgaddhkoddajcdgocldbbfleckgcbcid

Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/cookie-txt/

Example of an command to use the cookies.txt file:

ytarchive --retry-stream 60 --cookies COOKIES.txt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K--bc2nM-JM best

Basically all you need to do is add "--cookies COOKIES.txt" to your command that you want to use and it uses your cookies from that text file.

Standalone Use

You can also open ytarchive by just running ytarchive.exe, which opens this window. Here, you can just enter any YouTube livestream link:

After you open it, you simply paste the url of the livestream, choose the desired video quality, press enter and it starts recording the live stream:

If you want to record a live stream that is scheduled to start at a later point in time, you can do the same process I explained and poll for a stream. In this example, I used a 15 sec interval to check:

This is easier to use than using it over a command line window, but you cannot use all options - so using ytarchive over a command line window is preferred for the archiving process of YouTube streams.