Best YouTube downloader?

Burp Discussion
1

Could anyone recommend a good YouTube downloader, either an app or browser extension please?

I’ve been using aTube Catcher for a long time, but it is very inconsistent in the resolution it will allow you to download in. For whatever reason, it will randomly max out at 720p for certain videos, while with others will allow the full 1080p or higher. It seems to vary from day to day or moment to moment. I always prefer to have the 1080p version (4k is usually too big a size for larger videos though).

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If you don’t mind CLI programs, youtube-dl is the best downloader I’ve ever used. It supports way more sites than YouTube, and mine is set up to put videos into folders by uploader. There are GUIs for it but yeah, I just type in a command and boom, video at its highest quality.

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Thanks for the suggestion @Umbris, but I had to even google what CLI programs were. I’d normally consider myself fairly techy, but I think that one might be a bit outside my grasp :see_no_evil:

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I assure you, it sounds more complicated than it is. Here, I’ll describe a workflow:

  1. Create a folder with today’s date as the name using file explorer.
  2. Enter the folder.
  3. Paste in a copy of youtube-dl.exe .
  4. Click in the white space to the right of the name in the address bar.
  5. Type cmd.
  6. Press enter. (Windows will open a console pointing to this folder.)
  7. Type youtube-dl.exe , a space, and then paste a url.
  8. Press enter.
  9. It downloads the video, profit.

The hardest part is understanding what I mean by address bar and so on. Here’s a video of someone performing those actions.

Once you have confidence in that, maybe take a look at some of the flags that can change youtube-dl’s behavior. I recommend pasting -f 18 -o “%(uploader)s yt %(upload_date)s %(id)s %(title)s.%(ext)s” between exe and the url. The first pair is a youtube specific format flag of acceptable quality. (Use -F to see the available formats.) The second pair tells it how to name the resulting file. The other two I use are sleep and rarely the username plus password.

I don’t have a stake in whether you use this tool, I’ll never know. But I’m emphasizing that anyone can do this.

2 Likes
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Thanks for that @gilly I appreciate the step-by-step!
Could you recommend a credible website to grab the .exe from? I’m always a bit wary downloading from sites I don’t recognise.

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This page hosts the versions built by the code owners. This nearby page lists all the flags, given that I alluded to others.

1 Like
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Thanks again @gilly!