I had never before heard of Downie – a YouTube video downloader. I’ve have used some of those in the past, but I don’t recall their names. I wonder if anyone else has experience with Downie?
I have it but have not had success with YouTube downloads, but it may be dependent on the particular content.
I know you want answers from “anyone else" but I just want to say that I’ve been a satisfied user of Downie for many years. Why? it downloads video from just about any source, not just YouTube, close to 100% of the time, the developer releases regular updates and is very responsive to user inquiries, and paying for the software is a purchase rather than a subscription.
As an aside, the developer was the victim of an automated Apple App Store review process back in 2020 (coverage of the fiasco was how I first heard about Downie) :
https://9to5mac.com/2020/08/05/mistake-by-apple/
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I bought Downie 4 and have been very happy with it. I’ve downloaded several NASA YouTube videos and others without problems. As has been pointed out, updates come fairly frequently.
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Downie is the best of them. Most reliable and regularly updated.
Clipgrab is free and open source, also recommended.
4kdownloader has a very limited trial, there’s sites as well, yout.com and others, they get unpleasant pretty quickly.
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Agree 100% about Downie. Use it weekly. It works on many more sites than just YouTube, too.
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I have no experience with Downie, but based on what everyone else here says, it looks like a great option.
If you subscribe to Parallels Toolbox or get it as part of your Parallels Workstation subscription, it includes a simple video downloader that works fine with YouTube. Parallels Toolbox is quite underappreciated, in my opinion. It is a surprisingly rich collection of useful little tools that are accessible from your Mac’s menu bar. It reminds me of the good old days of classic Mac uitility packages.
That said, I usually use the free, open-source JDownloader2 for YouTube videos. The interface is a bit clunky and complicated, but it offers a lot of options, including downloading YouTube content as video or as an audio track, and more. The default installer includes adware, as often happens with open-source media tools, but here is a link to a page with adware-free “clean” installers:
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I’ve used both Downie and 4K Video Downloader+ for years, mostly for YouTube.
Both work very well, and have simple and easy-to-use interfaces. I think for most people, Downie would have a slight edge in usability terms. I tend to prefer 4K Video Downloader+, but it’s for mostly subjective reasons: I occasionally need to change the resolution or format, and I find it easier to make the tweaks in 4K VD+ (without having to search around re: how to do it).
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I am definitely glad @Halfsmoke amplified on his experiences. Taught me to phrase more inclusively. Feel free to override my words like he did! 
Along with many other great utilities, I’d forgotten Parallels Toolbox. It should be called something other than “Parallels” because that makes you think it’s VM software. It’s actually a munificent collection of utilities, just like the good old days as @josehill says.
I’m going to look at all of the video downloading utilities mentioned, but I particularly urge folx to try out Parallels Toolbox. It was great in my memory and probably darn useful now. It is and is not in the same category as iStatMenus as a bundle of menu utilities.
P.S.
One caveat, I opened the link provided by @josehill and got an interrupting dialog after a while. Therefore I turned on StopTheScript for that web site for one day. I paid for this earlier in the year and things have been so much less frustrating.
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Another vote for 4K Video Downloader+.
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Once downloaded, what is a good app for putting them together in a sequenced loop for showing to an audience?
David
VLC will work through a playlist. Not sure if it would loop. I would be tempted to use Keynote and set up that to loop if not
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Bigasoft Video Downloader is a paid app (quite expensive) that is very versatile, It facilitates downloading of a range of video sources.
I just use yt-dlp on the command line installed via Homebrew. It uses ffmpeg and can work well with the mpv command line video player. I suspect many GUI apps are using this under the hood. IINA is using the mpv.io libraries. There is a lot of power in ffmpeg as well. I have a few scripts to exercise many of the options available with ffmpeg so I don’t have to remember the long sequence of command line parameters. It’s a video / audio Swiss Army pocket knife. I am not paying for apps such as Downie when I can use these open source tools instead.
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I have used Downie since I heard about it at MacBreak Weekly several years ago. It works very well for my use – mainly YouTube downloads.
Downie just works. I don’t use it a lot but when I have, it performed flawlessly.
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I had mentioned way back in the beginning of this thread that I had problems with Downie, but I have recently tried it again and agree with others here that it works very well and is updated regularly. I always consider that last bit an important indicator that a software has an audience and the developer is addressing the needs if that audience.
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And another. I’ve been using this for years, and have always been impressed with how on-top-of-things the developers are with updates.
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Downie for me—works well in unexpected places. Love it!
I find Reaper (DAW) (reaper.fm) very fast and easy to do that. Not only can you string audio and video files together, you can easily trim out unwanted portions, change audio volume levels, add cross-fades, use plugin’s to enhance gnarly audio, and on and on…
For non-commercial users it costs $60 which is good for the current thru end of the next major version updates including frequent minor version updates. They also offer “You get 60 days of evaluation free, with full functionality, and no strings attached.”
After many years using Reaper, me thinks the nominal cost is a great bang for our buck.
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