Today January 17, 2018, Youtube put a new policy change that prevents anyone with less than 1000 subscribers and certain number of views and activity from generating revenue from the ads on their channel. This prompted me to find a youtube video downloader that wasn't from Digital Wave (DVDvideoSoft, FreeMake) as I did not want to pay their premium prices.
Youtube-dl to the rescue, but it didn't work as expected. I using it my bash shell and kept downloading the first video of a playlist or channel no matter what I did.
for example:
youtube-dl -i ..://youtube.com/url_to_channel_or_playlist
the output wasn't very helpful and the help on the issues pages for the github wasn't either.
Then in frustration I got the windows version and did the same thing and this time it complained about the "&" sign.
So I went back to the Linux and added quotes around the url and wala, everything is working!
Therefore the proper way to use youtube-dl is glob your urls.
case in point:
youtube-dl -i "...://youtube.com/url_to_channel_or_playlist"
I posted this because I saw several questions on here where there no responses and the threads were locked probably because of age