How To Download A Youtube Video To Computer

There are billions of hours of video on YouTube. Literally. And that's hardly the most astounding statistic nearly the site, which has been the go-to destination for uploading and watching video since 2005. That said, sometimes, you actually desire or need to take one of those videos on your own reckoner or phone. But when the topic of downloading YouTube videos comes upwards, there'due south a side subject field that must be broached: Is it legal?

On the copyright front, as long every bit yous're downloading a video for your own personal offline use, you're probably okay. It's more than blackness and white when you consider Google'south terms of service for YouTube, which read: "You are not immune to...access, reproduce, download, distribute, transmit, broadcast, display, sell, license, alter, modify or otherwise use any part of the Service or any Content except: (a) as expressly authorized by the Service; or (b) with prior written permission from YouTube and, if applicable, the corresponding rights holders."

Watching YouTube videos offline through unofficial channels takes coin from Google and video creators. There's a reason YouTube runs ads: People brand a living this way.

Plainly, stealing videos from YouTube is a large no-no. If y'all desire to share a video, YouTube and virtually other video sites arrive piece of cake, from embedding to emailing to sharing via social networks. You but do non demand to download a video virtually of the time.

However, you have your reasons. If y'all must download a YouTube video—admittedly need to, just for yourself, and not for broadcasting, and non to exist a full douche-nozzle—here'south how.

Note: This story is updated frequently as the tools involved change regularly. Some of those changes are not always pleasant, such as software so total of "extras," it gets flagged as malware by antivirus tools. The same goes for the helper websites—a change in a site's ad network tin also create issues with malware.

To prevent this from becoming a laundry list of programs and sites that tin download YouTube videos, we came upward with a few rules for inclusion. Services must:

Support 4K downloads fifty-fifty in the free version.
Work with top three video sites:YouTube, Facebook, and Vimeo.
Download unabridged playlists or channels in a batch (on YouTube), at to the lowest degree with a paid version.
Output to MP3 for sound (or offering companion software that does so).
Take an interface thatdoesn't suck.
Non collect your personal data beyond your email address.
Not contain malware. If there'due south fifty-fifty a whiff of it in the air, even a PUP, it'south out.

The programs, services, and sites in this story are all free of spam/virus/problems every bit of this writing, merely caveat emptor. Big fourth dimension. Especially if you're not actually emptor-ing.

YouTube Premium Downloads

Now available for subscribers of YouTube Premium—the paid version of YouTube that allows you to spotter without ads—are video downloads. Kind of. There'due south one caveat with quality: All the video you download is express to 1080p quality max, or lower. No 4K.

The biggest outcome is, this feature doesn't really download a video to relieve on your reckoner forever. It is more akin to the download feature establish on mobile apps for Netflix and Hulu, which makes a streaming video available to watch later using your local storage and views it using the app's interface merely. This is not a method that allows you to, say, spotter a video using different software such equally the VLC Media Player.

Yous access the download by going to the YouTube hamburger carte du jour and selecting Downloads to view the list of what yous've grabbed. The folio says "Downloads remain available as long every bit your device has an active cyberspace connection at least once every 30 days." This probably isn't exactly what you are looking for in a download. But the tools below deliver exactly that.

Desktop Software

Tertiary-political party software is where y'all volition go the best command over downloading online videos. Typically, you paste the URL for the YouTube video you desire into the program, and information technology downloads the highest quality version information technology can observe. For videos in 1080p High Definition (HD) format, that's commonly an MP4 file. For anything college in quality—4K or 8K—the file format is typically MKV.

In the past, YouTube videos were Wink-based, then your download was an FLV file, simply those tend to be harder to play back. MP4 (brusque for MPEG-4 Office 14 multimedia format) plays everywhere

Note that the MKV file, too called a Matroska, is a container—the file could contain video utilizing whatever number of codecs inside. The fool-proof mode to play them all is to utilize the VLC Media Player for Windows, which plays everything. (Read more than about information technology below.) Equally for the downloaders, here are the best options.

VLC Media Player

Gratis; Windows, macOS, Linux

We mention VLC Media Player to a higher place considering information technology'southward a fantastic tool for Windows, Mac, and Linux users that plays dorsum just virtually whatsoever media ever created. Information technology likewise has the power to download YouTube videos, albeit in a convoluted way. (If you run into any problems, endeavor a full re-install of VLC and articulate your enshroud to make information technology work.)

Copy a URL from a YouTube video, and then open up VLC. From the Media menu, select Open Network Stream (Ctrl+N) and paste in the URL. Click Play. When the video is playing, go to Tools > Codec Information. There is a box at the bottom chosen "Source"—re-create the URL you find in that box.

Go dorsum to your browser and paste the URL—it's a temporary spider web address and will elapse eventually—in the address bar and kickoff playing the video. When you're viewing the video in the browser, click the 3-dot carte at the lower right for the download option to keep information technology locally.

However, information technology appears that VLC is simply going to salvage your file as 1080p and not any higher, even if the original YouTube stream was available in 1440p or 2160p (aka 4K). It also won't catechumen video to other formats. To get those options, you need the desktop software below.

4K Video Downloader

Free or $15 for lifetime license on 3 computers; Windows, macOS, Ubuntu Linux, Android

Multi-lingual 4K Video Downloader (4KVD) is ofttimes updated and features clear download links on the plan's website; no ad traps hither. The software does what it advertises in a simple interface. Information technology grabs videos upwards to 8K in quality and downloads to plenty of formats. Simply re-create a YouTube URL and click the Paste Link button to become started. 4KVD volition even grab subtitles, entire playlists, and all the videos in a channel to which you subscribe. The sites supported are limited to the big names similar YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and a few others, but that covers most of what you need. It does display a large banner advert to proceed the lights on and you're limited to 30 downloads a day on the free version.

I had to brand a switch from MP4 to MKV format to go my test video to download in 4K. 4KVD snagged the three-minute, 229.7MB file for the picture trailer in nearly 1 infinitesimal and xx seconds. 4KVD defaults back to 1080p HD, so I made the same switch when downloading an Ultra High Definition (8K) playlist.

If you enable the Smart Mode and its presets, 4KVD tin can perform one-click downloads to your favorite format. If you want to download more than 25 videos at a time or subscribe to YouTube channels to instantly download the latest, that requires the paid version. Playback of the resulting MKV files via VLC Media Player was flawless.

The program itself has an selection to extract audio to MP3 format, and so you don't even need the 4K YouTube to MP3 companion software.

VideoProc Converter

$59.ninety for 1 year, $78.90 lifetime, $119.90 family (2-5 PCs); Windows, macOS

The powerful VideoProc from Digiarty comes in an editor edition and this converter, which also provides editing and effects. The downloading attribute is great, a version like to Digiarty'due south WinX YouTube Downloader, which you can still find but is not promoted by the company these days. This makes sense, as VideoProc Converter handles a lot of downloading, supposedly supporting 4K from over ane,000 websites. With hardware dispatch, information technology promises some speed. Thankfully, it oft offers price discounts.

To utilize information technology, y'all open up the software, let information technology find your hardware to come across what you have to help with dispatch (if anything). Click the Downloader button, click Add video to identify as many URLs equally you want to batch, and then Download Now. Or y'all can get a whole YouTube playlist or live stream. It grabbed our 697MB test 4K video to WEBM format in about 2 minutes and 15 seconds, which isn't bad. Best of all, the trial version of VideoProc Converter, which limits conversions to 5 minutes, doesn't appear to limit downloads.

FlixGrab

1-year license $44.99 plus tax (or $9.99 for Free YouTube Download); Windows

Like some others, FlixGrab has several different programs available, many with overlapping features. For instance, it has FlixGrabMS (a version you get from the Microsoft Store to run on Windows 10/xi)—just it wouldn't let me grab video from YouTube. The directly download of the FlixGrab program from the flixgrabapp.com site did piece of work with YouTube and several other sites,. Plus it offers a Free YouTube Download that is specific to YouTube, yet uses the same easy-to-use interface. The downside, equally with others, is the high subscription price, just information technology'due south the merely way to get high-quality downloads. The YouTube-only version is substantially cheaper at $9.99 per year, nevertheless. Neither comes with a trial period.

5KPlayer

Free; Windows and macOS

The gratis 5KPlayer is a lot more than a downloader, simply it's got a heck of an integrated downloader. Promising no viruses, ads, or plug-in requirements is a good get-go. It is, sadly, one of the few tested that asks for a registration of your name and electronic mail—you have to do that to get the full download office across 300+ sites. However, you lot can still nab 4K vids from YouTube without registering.

When downloading, the programme does try to hide some things. Paste in the URL for a YouTube video and the analysis engine runs and shows only a few download options. Click the gear icon, then the Prove All push, and scroll to encounter more—like a 4K 3,840-by-2,160 file in WebM format. The 227MB WebM test download took an agonizing 6.v minutes. Grabbing playlists was possible, but you must adjust download settings one video at a time. The confusing interface makes it hard to go back to the other videos in the playlist.

5K Player as well features DLNA server playback so videos you take hold of tin can be watched on any devices that support DLNA, plus it supports AirPlay for quick playback to Apple tree devices. Pick a video in the library for quick conversion to MP4, MP3, or even ACC (the audio format preferred by iOS). The player didn't like playing back the overly big 4K file, though, and experienced buffering issues (VLC didn't have any problem with the same file).

Ultimately, in that location'due south a lot to like nigh 5K Player, from the cost to the features, peculiarly if you look at them as extras on a downloader. But the bad interface, boring download speeds, and playback issues may have you looking elsewhere.

Helper Websites

Exercise you want to avoid installing software? Video download helper sites are supposed to practise the download piece of work for you. All of them exercise i basic thing: You give them a YouTube URL (or another video site, if supported), they parse information technology, give you lot a selection of what size download y'all want, and provide a link to said download. They work on whatever platform, sometimes even on mobile devices. Yous don't have to install anything on your PC. It can take a lot longer, depending on the size and quality of the video you lot want, but you can't shell the convenience.

The trouble is, you lot can't always trust them. There are hundreds of these types of sites out there—it seems anyone with a modicum of coding power has fix one up. Such sites easily go from useful to suspicious, especially if they get popular and the proprietor sells out to brand greenbacks off your visits.

Recommended past Our Editors

Since this story was first published, all the helper sites we recommended have been removed for reasons like adding sexually explicit ads, no longer working, switching to pushing its download utility only, and ane for going out of business organisation to avoid getting sued.

For that reason, we're not recommending any helper sites at the moment. Endeavor ane if you find it, but if your browser, antivirus, or instincts throw upward warnings, avoid and move on.

Extensions

A browser extension tin save you a pace. Yet, you're going to run into some issues with downloading video from YouTube, especially if yous're using Chrome as your primary browser.

The Chrome Web Store—where you get Chrome browser extensions—is controlled past YouTube'due south owner Alphabet/Google. Even an extension ostensibly for this purpose isn't going to let YouTube direct downloads, because of Chrome Store restrictions. In general, with Chrome extensions, the download of any RTMP protocol video (protected videos) or streaming video isn't possible. You tin use them on other sites with video, of form. Just not YouTube.

Want to get effectually it? Go an extension that does not come up from the Google Web Shop. Some of the programs and helper sites offer an extension component and will spell out how to do the install without the assist the Chrome Web Store usually provides. Here are a couple.

YouTube Video Downloader

Free; Chrome, Opera, Edge, Vivaldi, UCBrowser

YouTube Video Downloader from Addoncrop is on multiple browsers merely with excellent side-load capabilities. Information technology puts a button beneath whatsoever video yous're playing on YouTube, or fifty-fifty an embedded YouTube video, making it easy to grab. Supported video quality goes upwards to 8K. You tin also catechumen audio from the video to an MP3. It volition even help y'all take video screenshots.

Video DownloadHelper

Free; Firefox, Chrome, Edge

Video DownloadHelper supports a huge number of sites—even those for adults. You'll know a video is downloadable when the icon for the extension animates when you're on the spider web page. Video DownloadHelper for Chrome has stopped working with YouTube; that fashion, it could go placement in the Chrome Web Store. Get around that by using the Video DownloadHelper extension on Firefox or Edge instead.

Mobile

Downloading from YouTube using an Android app from the Google Play Store is a challenge, given that Google has a tight grip on the site it owns, and offers the paid YouTube Premium service that supports offline viewing.

That said, with Android, information technologyis possible to install apps without going through Google. For example, InsTube – Free Video and Music Downloader for Android can but be found at InsTube's site. Download the APK (Android application package) file to sideload on an Android device. Observe information technology in your device's downloads and click to install. (Yous may have to go into your security settings and enable "Unknown sources.")

On iPhones and iPads, you'd think there would exist no such restriction since Apple and Google aren't exactly the all-time of pals (or maybe they are). However, on the iOS apps I have tried, non only wouldn't they download from YouTube, but they're besides typically not available for long. One of those apps said in its clarification, "Downloading from YouTube is prohibited due to its Terms of Service." Apple is ensuring that app makers play past the rules—even Google's rules.

Chances are, the minute you find an iOS app that can download YouTube videos, information technology will get "fixed" or banned. The only real option is to jailbreak your iPhone and use sideloaded apps that download what y'all want.

There are workarounds. One is to subscribe to YouTube Premium; it lets you download video on your iPhone or iPad to sentinel later, much as Netflix and Hulu do.

Another is using a free iOS file manager app like Documents by Readdle. Utilise the Safari browser to visit a YouTube video, and utilize the Share option to notice Copy Link. Then go back to Documents, and apply the built-in browser in the app to surf to a video download helper site. Paste the link into the form (concord your finger down on it until you get the "Paste" card to pop up). The site volition requite you lot the links to download, and y'all can salvage the file to Documents. Hold and drag the file up, until yous're back on the main screen, then drag information technology to the Photos folder. Yous'll need to give Documents permission to admission Photos the first time. Y'all tin can and so access the video like you would whatsoever video taken on the phone or tablet—in the Photos app.

Some other workaround: Become back to the desktop and try AnyTrans ($39.99 for a single computer for 1 yr, Windows or macOS; $59.99 lifetime plan), a desktop file manager for iOS devices that has an integrated downloader supporting 900 sites, including YouTube and Facebook. Information technology'll transfer the videos to the iPhone for you over the USB cable. Fifty-fifty if y'all don't pay for AnyTrans, the download option remains and is free forever.

YT Scribe

Want a truly unique way to "download" a video? YT Scribe lets you lot catch the transcription so you can read them instead. It auto-transcribes, punctuates, and paragraphs the text. The amend the subtitles, the better the "article," of course. Best of all, information technology's totally free.

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Source: https://www.pcmag.com/how-to/how-to-download-youtube-videos

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