Saving YT vids

Get help or discuss anything relating to audio/video software & hardware
Post Reply
AndInTheEnd
Posts: 67
Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:12 pm
Has thanked: 5 times

Saving YT vids

Post by AndInTheEnd »

Hi guys

Sorry if this has been asked before - or it's verboten - but I just wondered if anyone knew of any freebie software that can be used in the UK for saving YouTube videos. I know there used to be a couple (keepvid was one), but they all seem to have disappeared now (I guess for legal reasons).

As I say, if this is something that I shouldn't be asking here, I will go away rightly admonished.

Thanks guys

AiTE
Kusaywa
Posts: 67
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2021 1:54 am

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by Kusaywa »

Gringo557
Posts: 344
Joined: Thu May 19, 2022 6:42 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 43 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by Gringo557 »

I use this Firefox add on and it works great . . .

https://www.yourvideofile.org/
AndInTheEnd
Posts: 67
Joined: Tue Mar 02, 2021 1:12 pm
Has thanked: 5 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by AndInTheEnd »

Yay, thanks so much! Never thought of the Firefox add-on route, and that works brilliant for me.

You guys - and this whole site - is fabulous.

Thank you again!!

AiTE
zaval80
Posts: 390
Joined: Sun Mar 07, 2021 9:19 pm
Has thanked: 23 times
Been thanked: 18 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by zaval80 »

JDownloader 2.
User avatar
Le petit prince
Posts: 18
Joined: Tue Feb 08, 2022 8:51 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 6 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by Le petit prince »

The 'mother of them all' is IMHO youtube-dl (Wikipedia). It's a free and open source download manager for YouTube and over 1.000 other websites written in Python, so it's pretty much platform-independent. The command line syntax is rather straight forward if you're willing to read a bit of its man pages or use a cheat sheet. So nothing really to worry about.

I frequently use it in my workflows to download the specific (usually best) YouTube video and audio stream format of a video (listed by youtube-dl -F https://youtube.com/your-video) which I then remux together into a new MPEG4 or Matroska container with ffmpeg (Wikipedia). This avoids transcoding and thus preserves the original quality of the files.
User avatar
Egg_Crisis
Posts: 131
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:24 pm
Has thanked: 8 times
Been thanked: 21 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by Egg_Crisis »

Le petit prince wrote: Sun Jun 19, 2022 8:42 pm which I then remux together into a new MPEG4 or Matroska container with ffmpeg
Youtube-dl does that itself, you don't need to do it seperately.
(You need to download the video and audio in the one command, so something like -f 135+140).
User avatar
DrRobert
Posts: 51
Joined: Sat Mar 20, 2021 1:45 pm
Has thanked: 4 times
Been thanked: 8 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by DrRobert »

VLC can do it as well
User avatar
Egg_Crisis
Posts: 131
Joined: Sat Feb 20, 2021 3:24 pm
Has thanked: 8 times
Been thanked: 21 times

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by Egg_Crisis »

Does anyone have any advice on how I would go about downloading a vid that's geo blocked? (Video is only viewable in the US.)
youtube_dl has various settings that are supposed to deal with it but none of them work, and I looked up some US proxies and tried those with the appropriate setting in youtube-dl and that didn't work either.
Mirror Spock
Posts: 10
Joined: Sun Jun 06, 2021 7:22 am

Re: Saving YT vids

Post by Mirror Spock »

Replay Media Catcher demo is free and will download the entirety of youtube videos. You can choose the resolution and preferred format (mkv vs mp4 vs ...). You can give it a playlist and it will expand automatically for all the videos in the playlist. geo-locked: try a VPN?
Post Reply