1. Install yt-dlp
winget ships with Windows 10 and 11 and handles the PATH for you, which is the part people get wrong when installing by hand.
winget install yt-dlp.yt-dlp
If you already use Scoop or Chocolatey, either is equally fine:
scoop install yt-dlp choco install yt-dlp
The manual route is a single yt-dlp.exe from the official releases page. Put it in a folder that is on your PATH — dropping it on the Desktop works only while your terminal happens to be in that folder, which is the usual cause of "yt-dlp is not recognized".
2. Install ffmpeg
yt-dlp downloads without ffmpeg, but everything interesting needs it: merging separate video and audio, MP3 extraction, embedding subtitles or thumbnails, cutting sections. Install it now rather than after the first confusing failure.
winget install Gyan.FFmpeg
3. Check it worked
Open a new terminal — an existing one still has the old PATH — and run:
yt-dlp --version ffmpeg -version
Two version numbers means you are done.
Quoting on Windows
PowerShell and cmd do not quote the way bash does, and a command copied from a Linux-oriented tutorial often breaks for exactly this reason. In PowerShell, single quotes are literal — the safest choice for a format selector or an output template. In cmd, use double quotes. In a .bat file, every % must be doubled.
yt-dlp -o '%(title)s.%(ext)s' URL # PowerShell yt-dlp -o "%(title)s.%(ext)s" URL # cmd yt-dlp -o "%%(title)s.%%(ext)s" URL # inside a .bat file
The generator's shell switch produces the right form for each of these, so you can copy without translating.
Updating
A standalone yt-dlp.exe updates itself with yt-dlp -U. Installed via winget, Scoop or Chocolatey, update it through the same tool — self-update will refuse, because the package manager owns the file.