App to Download YouTube Videos

by Rian

There are many web-based YouTube downloaders out there, but I thought to share one that is known to work locally. Instead of worrying about which button is the real “download” on the web, I thought why not use a program that runs locally and possibly from more reputable sources.

yt-dlp is an open source, command-line based program that is configurable to heart’s content. There is a bit of a learning curve as it is command-line. For majority of use cases to simply download a video, yt-dlp [URL] would suffice. It’s also possible to separate the audio and video, or download each individually, at the desired quality, if needed.

Granted, programs like yt-dlp do sit in a gray area. For example, if you are looking for music, I would highly recommend checking out streaming services first. Not only these services tend to offer higher quality audios, they likely have bigger libraries than YouTube does. The only time I use the tool is when I don’t want to bring out an optical drive to rip the discs I have — the ones Apple Music only has metadata of. I do wish more digital oriented medium would catch on; heck, even USB thumb drives would do. I did hear there was an attempt with SD cards, don’t know how popular it ever got.