How do I force Youtube-DL to download the best quality MP4-DASH video?

[Videogamer555]

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Question

How do I make Youtube-DL actually pick the highest quality MP4-DASH video/audio streams? I know I can do default which selects what it thinks are the best quality DASH streams regardless of format (it will download webm audio/video DASH streams if it thinks those are best). I can force it to download MP4 video by using "-f mp4" but this only works for forcing it to download the best quality single-file MP4 video. Unfortunately on Youtube this is limited to 720p. If 1080p (or better) is available it will ONLY be available via DASH streams. I need to know how to force Youtube-DL to download the best quality MP4-DASH streams (AAC for audio, and h264 for video). And one other thing, I want it to ONLY use h264 codec for video, and ignore any streams using the AV1 codec, as not all video player software supports this codec yet. Is there a way to force it to use best quality MP4-h264-DASH for the video stream and best quality AAC-DASH for the audio stream?

[dirkf]

Read the manual section Format Selection.

However, run yt-dl with -F to list the available formats; then either select a listed format or pair of formats (eg -f 137+140) or use some selection criteria; how you formulate the criteria will depend on whether you have a lower limit for the resolution you'll accept. Eg:

-f 'bestvideo[ext=mp4][vcodec!^=av0][vcodec!^=av1]+bestaudio[ext=m4a]/mp4/best' --recode-video mp4

[dirkf]

Also, almost a duplicate of #29794, and see also #29783.