Beyond Streaming: Why and How to Download Videos from YouTube

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Originally published at: Beyond Streaming: Why and How to Download Videos from YouTube - TidBITS

A while back, a question on TidBITS Talk sparked a lengthy discussion about YouTube downloaders: apps, utilities, and services that let you download YouTube videos to standalone files on your Mac.

My initial reaction to the enthusiasm for YouTube downloaders was puzzlement. I’m not sure I’ve ever wanted to download a YouTube video. In the rare event that I’ve wanted to rewatch something, finding and streaming it again has been trivial. Apart from occasionally viewing something offline, why would so many people want permanent copies of videos that are readily available on YouTube to watch at any time? So I asked just that.

TidBITS Talk readers were quick to share convincing answers, and while I haven’t personally become an inveterate downloader, I can easily see why someone might. Here then are six reasons to download YouTube videos, followed by suggestions for apps that make it easy.

Why Download Videos from YouTube?

All of these reasons revolve around the fact that YouTube, as ubiquitous as it is, can’t meet everyone’s needs at every moment. They include:

  • Offline viewing: The most obvious reason you’d want to download videos from YouTube is to watch where Internet access is unreliable, unavailable, or expensive. Readers cited planes and trains, classrooms with spotty Wi-Fi, homes dependent on limited cellular Internet, and repair scenarios without connectivity. Downloading and watching offline also ensures that a presentation will not be derailed by network failures, buffering, or advertisements. Jeff Fischer, silbey, Jolin, David, and MacGuyver described variations on this need.
  • Preservation: YouTube is not a reliable archive. Streams of live performances may be available for only a few days, recordings may disappear after copyright complaints, and creators can remove videos at any time. Even when a video remains online, the addition of new videos or tweaks to the search algorithm can make it difficult to locate again. Readers have used downloading to preserve limited-time theatrical performances, rare concerts, long-out-of-print recordings, decades-old school footage, and videos featuring family members. See posts by Halfsmoke, Alan Forkosh, turbineseaplane, and MacGuyver.
  • Research and reference: Many videos are informational or training resources rather than entertainment. Readers maintain local collections of photography documentaries, linguistic research material, craft demonstrations, repair instructions, and tutorials they may need to consult years later. A local archive of video is searchable (particularly with the addition of transcripts), independent of YouTube, and available whenever it’s needed. Tommy Weir, P. Boersting, Sherman Wilcox, Jane Sprando, and Jeff Swart offered examples.
  • Teaching, presentation, and editing: All you can do with a video on YouTube is play it. In contrast, a downloaded file can be trimmed, incorporated into another project, or queued alongside other material without depending on YouTube during the presentation. Students use clips in documentaries and mashups, instructors incorporate footage into classes, and one reader loops college sports videos at reunion luncheons. See posts from David Tuma, Tommy Weir, josehill, and silbey.
  • Better playback control: Local files eliminate YouTube’s advertisements, suggested video overlays, and interface limitations. They can be looped for music practice, replayed repeatedly while following a complicated repair, organized into a curated collection for watching on an Apple TV via Home Sharing, or paused and scrubbed using a preferred player. Ladd, Suman Chakrabarti, Jeff Meyer, and MacGuyver cited these advantages.
  • Audio extraction: Sometimes the video track itself is irrelevant. Readers download DJ sets as MP3 files, turn talk-oriented videos into personal podcast episodes, and import rare musical recordings into the Music app. Jolin, adamrice, josehill, and Jeff Swart described audio-oriented workflows.

These categories may overlap to an extent, but you get the idea: there are numerous reasons to create your own local archive of videos.

Recommended YouTube-Downloading Apps

How do you go about downloading a YouTube video? It’s not as though YouTube itself offers a download button. (YouTube Premium does allow offline viewing within its app, but those downloads expire, can’t be transferred to other players, and don’t address most of the use cases above.) TidBITS Talk participants suggested numerous ways to download YouTube videos, but two stand out:

  • Downie: Charlie Monroe’s Downie was the clear favorite among Mac users in the discussion. It lets you paste or drag in a URL, use a browser extension, extract audio, and download subtitles or transcripts. Downie also works with many sites beyond YouTube and can handle authenticated downloads. Several people noted that Monroe is extremely responsive to user inquiries, and updates appear frequently. Downie costs $19.99 and is available in Setapp. Recommendations came from Suman Chakrabarti, Halfsmoke, Nalarider, Tommy Weir, Gordon Meyer, Jeff Meyer, Jörgen Olsson, Richard Ripley, Ray, Bill Stanford, Jeff Swart, and osric.Downie
  • 4K Video Downloader Plus: Several participants recommended 4K Video Downloader Plus, which can download YouTube playlists, channels, and search results, as well as YouTube Watch Later, liked videos, and private YouTube playlists. It provides control over resolution, file format, subtitles, and audio extraction. As with Downie, it supports numerous other sites, and updates appear frequently. The free version of 4K Video Downloader Plus allows downloading 10 videos per day; the pricing page outlines the differences between the $15-per-year subscription, the $25 lifetime Personal version, and the $45 lifetime Pro version. Jeff Meyer, Ladd, Donnie, David C., and David Bilides provided recommendations.4K Video Downloader Plus

A few other mentioned solutions included ClipGrab, a free graphical downloader that occasionally succeeds where other apps fail but is still Intel-only; Cobalt, a free browser-based downloader; JDownloader 2, an open source alternative that’s flexible but complicated; Yout, another free browser-based solution that lets you convert online videos to several different downloadable formats; and yt-dlp, an open source solution for those who want a powerful, customizable command line tool (another app, Stacher, offers an optional graphical front end for yt-dlp).

Storing, Cataloging, and Finding Downloaded Videos

As I was writing this article, I realized that no one had said much about what they did with these videos after downloading them. How do people store, catalog, and find these videos in the future?

Several people said they maintained Plex servers and would add downloaded videos they wanted to keep to their Plex library. Although Plex is free, it’s designed to serve media to multiple devices, so it’s more of a commitment than a simple video library.

Although the video players VLC and IINA were mentioned in the discussion, neither came up in the context of accessing a personal archive of stored videos. Nevertheless, it appears that VLC’s Media Library can maintain a list of video files stored in the Finder; double-clicking one plays it. After brief experimentation, I found VLC’s approach frustrating: videos and the Media Library occupy the same window, so closing a video also closes the library, requiring me to reopen it manually each time. Infuse looks like an easier option.

When I asked about this in the TidBITS Talk discussion, most people said they simply stored everything in Finder folders. Michael Paine supplements Finder storage by adding videos to specific playlists in iTunes while not copying the files from his external drive. Tommy Weir stores his research-focused videos in DEVONthink, and I could easily see DEVONthink also making it easy to search through stored transcripts.

Perhaps the Finder is all that’s needed here, though this situation feels ripe for custom app development for those with specific or intensive cataloging needs. If you’re a video packrat, how do you solve this problem?

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Nice summary of a lengthy thread! I’d like to add that several of the mentioned tools also will happily download videos from platforms beyond YouTube, including Vimeo, Facebook, TikTok, and X. I have the most experience with JDownloader2 for this purpose, but I’m sure others can do it, too.

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A useful reference article - thank you.

My main tip, if using Finder to store and locate videos, is to create topic/project folders and use the macOS alias feature to fill those folders with aliases of the video files (that could be on an external drive). That way you save storage space on the local drive and can have one video included as an alias in several “topic” folders - similar to a relational database.

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Good summary. Regarding storage (and I am indeed a video packrat–of epic proportions): if it’s something I figure I might like to access often, I add it to my Mac TV app library. Otherwise, I move it to an attached 2TB external SSD, where I keep them organized in folders, and where I can easily view them using Quicktime.

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Just a personal post — if any of you watched the YouTube videos of the Delta plane that was hit by a mortar firework while it was landing at Midway Airport in Chicago on July 4th — my son was the captain flying the plane. Luckily, no one was hurt, but definitely scared! The plane was ok, too. Now I am adding fireworks to list to worry about when he flies

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Goodness Jane. Glad to hear he, the crew and passengers are okay.

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Can’t believe you don’t know about NeoFinder. It’s everything a cataloguer needs for images and similar matter. cdfinder.de Check it out.

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For storing and managing videos downloaded from YouTube…I simply add them to the TV app. This generally makes them playable on my AppleTV as well.

There are some videos which AppleTV, for no good reason that I can see, will not play, but Plex can generally handle them—which reinforces my impression that there’s no good reason why AppleTV can’t play them.

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I use Downie.

If I really want to keep the download, I transfer it to an external drive.
The reasons I do this were listed in the article 1) Offline viewing (for a long time I had poor internet, I also realized it got rid of the ads); 2) Research & Reference & Teaching; 3) Audio extraction. I could relate to all the reasons listed.

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Also: PullTube. Pulltube – beautiful online video downloader I’ve been using this app for years; it’s easy and very flexible. Sometimes if a video or audio file is simply part of a page, the URL for that page is all it needs. It’s not perfect in being able to download every time (uh, what is?), but I have few complaints. As for filing, as a professional photographer with many hundreds-of-thousands of images in many categories, it’s the Finder for me, which works exactly the same in Lightroom. Double clicking plays the video, so, pretty easy. My apps are Quicktime, Preview, VLC, and DaVinci Resolve. For trimming videos, Shutter Encoder will work, but my preference is LosslessCut. I’m gonna stop now…

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Any recommendations for iOS downloading videos from YouTube? I use iOS primarily, and more and more products come with video “manuals” these days. I have used shortcuts All Media Downloader and I used to use Upull.me video downloader shortcuts and a couple of others that have all been inconsistent.

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It might have used to have been that iTunes could, like Photos, be an organizer of files without duplicating them into its database (referenced) iirc.

I suppose iTunes is no more, but could say Music or Photos app be used to quickly view and organize downloaded videos kept in Finder in a referenced mode so as to avoid duplicating the files and hogging storage space?

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A musician I am helping uses MediaHuman YouTube Downloader - Playlists, Channels, 4K/8K Video and Audio Extraction
– and he is happy with that as he refuses to upgrade to a newer macOS (as he cannot live without Cover Flow in iTunes … ) and this still works.

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Music, yes. Go to its Settings → Files page and clear the “Copy files to Media folder” option:

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With this option cleared, adding files to Music will simply add a reference in your Music database.

This means the file will become unplayable if you delete the file. Maybe also if you move it to a new location. But it won’t be duplicated.

Files purchased/downloaded from within the Music app (e.g., from the iTunes Store), will still be placed in the Media folder.

I don’t think Photos has any such option.

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There’s also a couple of apps, MacX YouTube Downloader and MacX Video Converter that can be used for this. Sometimes the downloader can be a bit glitchy, however.

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It does, luckily. I launched it to find out and forgot I had already put some referenced images in there with this setting (box unchecked):

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Now I consider it, I suppose many of the file handling apps we know could have a hand in ‘managing’ downloaded videos, like Graphic Converter, Nitro, and so on, if Finder alone is not enough

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I use free ClipGrab mostly, Works fine with M1 as well as Intel.

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Now that you mention it, I know of NeoFinder (was CDFinder long ago) but have never used it. Good suggestion!

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Anyone know of a download app for a US iPad user?

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So it does. I wonder if it’s always been there. I’m pretty sure iPhoto didn’t give you a choice. Or I’m completely misremembering.

But it’s not quite a no-consequence option as it is with Music. If you make any edits within Photos, I assume the edited copy will be created in the library. Or it will modify your original - which is worse.

And the simple act of importing photos will still create thumbnail images in the library.

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