I was recently searching for a video download utility for YouTube.com. I was concerned with one of my many YouTube channels, that may get terminated due to Youtube censorship. I wanted a quick and easy way to download all of my YouTube videos.
Browser based plugins like Video Download Helper are excellent. However, they really don’t have an easy option to download batches of YouTube videos at a time. I found this free stand alone application called Youtube-DL.
This program works on Apple Macintosh operating systems, Linux operating systems, and Microsoft Windows operating system platforms. A Microsoft windows operating system version is just a stand alone application. Also, you use a command line to download videos.
Actually you can use this tool to download videos from possibly hundreds of websites. Once you download this stand alone application, then you want to browse where you downloaded this program. Here is an example where youtube-dl.exe is located:
C:\Users\USER\Downloads\tools\youtube-dl.exe
You want to open up a command prompt window. You do not need to run this with administrative rights. Use a “cd” change directory command until you are in the same directory that you downloaded youtube-dl.exe to.
Then you want to get a Uniform Resource Locator of the video file you want to download. You can right click any YouTube video and then choose “Copy link address”. Now you type in youtube-dl.exe then the Uniform Resource Locator you want to download.
youtube-dl.exe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXKENUJgr-U&t=0s
This will download my video I made about YouTube DL. That is all you need to type in. However, this program is much more convoluted and complex.
You can download an entire playlist by specifying a YouTube playlist Uniform Resource Locator. Also, you can download all videos from a YouTube channel by specifying this type of Uniform Resource Locator:
youtube-dl.exe http://www.youtube.com/user/”channelname”/videos
Replace “channelname” with that particular Youtube channel’s name that you want to download videos from. You can check out all the variables and program switches for YouTube-DL.