The only thing that irritates me about youtube-dl is that by default it will try download audio and video tracks separately and then remux them on your computer. While it's a cool feature, I don't think this is what most people want 99% of the time.
That’s because the best quality streams are delivered that way by Google so if you want the higher quality video+audio you have to download them separately and remux them locally.
Don't know why this is being downvoted. VLC can play .part files of many formats, but not if they're seperate streams. I wish there was a way to just download the highest format that will download only one file.
no, that's the highest format, not the highest format that will download in one file, as opposed to two which have to be merged, meaning playing .part files is impossible
Are you saying the documentation is wrong? And not once but twice:
You can also use special names to select particular edge case format:
* best: Select best quality format represented by
single file with video and audio
And again:
> Since the end of April 2015 and version 2015.04.26 youtube-dl uses -f bestvideo+bestaudio/best as default format selection (see #5447, #5456). If ffmpeg or avconv are installed this results in downloading bestvideo and bestaudio separately and muxing them together into a single file giving the best overall quality available. Otherwise it falls back to best and results in downloading the best available quality served as a single file
