PCMag reviews products , but we may earn affiliate commissions from buying links on this page. There are billions of hours of video on YouTube. And that's hardly the , which has been the go-to destination for uploading and watching video since 2005. But that said, sometimes, you really just want or need to have one of those videos on your own computer or phone. When the topic of downloading YouTube videos comes up, there's a side subject that must be broached: Is it legal? When it comes to copyright, as long as you're downloading a video for your own personal offline use, you're probably okay. There's a reason YouTube runs pre-roll ads: people make a living that way. Want a video to explain it? Here's one from Video Creators from a couple of years ago. It references , which is now YouTube Premium, but the legal issues remain the same. Let's be clear: stealing video from YouTube is a big no-no. If you want to share a video, YouTube and most other video sites makes it easy, from embedding to emailing to sharing via social networks. You simply do not need to download a video most of the time. If you must download a YouTube video—absolutely need to, just for yourself, and not for dissemination, and not to be a total douche-nozzle—here's how. Note: This story is updated frequently as the tools involved change regularly. The same goes for the helper websites—a change in a site's ad network can also create issues with. If you're interested in programs and sites that only download music, read. We want to prevent this becoming a laundry list of programs and sites that can download YouTube vids—for there are far too many of these tools. If there's even a faint whiff of it in the air, even a , it's out. Especially if you're not really emptor-ing. Software Third-party software is where you will find the best control for downloading online videos. Typically, you paste the URL for the YouTube video you want into the program, and it downloads the highest quality version it can find. For videos in 1080p High Definition HD format, that's usually an MP4 file. For anything higher in quality—the so-called 4K and even 8K videos—the file format is usually MKV. It used to be that , so your download was an FLV file, but those tend to be harder to play back. MP4, short for , plays everywhere on anything. Note that the MKV file, also called a Matroska, is a container—the file could contain video in any number of codecs inside. The fool-proof way to play them all is to use the for Windows, which plays everything. As for the downloads, here are the best options. The software does what it advertises in a simple interface: grabs videos up to 4K actually 8K in quality and downloads to plenty of formats. Just copy a YouTube URL and click the Paste Link button to get started. The sites supported are more limited to the big names like YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and a few others, but that probably covers most of what you need. In tests, I had to make a switch from MP4 to MKV format to get my test video—the 3:13-minute trailer for M. Night Shyamalan's upcoming film Glass—to download in 4K. It defaults back to 1080p HD, so I made the same switch when downloading. If you enable the Smart Mode and its pre-sets, 4K Video Downloader can then do one-click downloads to your favorite format. Playback of the MKV file in VLC was flawless. The program itself has an option to extract audio to MP3 format, so you don't even need the companion software if you've got the original. Free, WinX claims to allow downloads from —including adult sites. When you copy a YouTube URL even for a playlist , you just click in the WinX software to launch. With Glass, this tool also tried to default to the 1,920-by-1,080 version in MP4; I picked the 4K version 3,840 by 2,160 pixels in , which is a subset of the MKV format—you can rename a. You can set up a number of them to back before you even click the download button. However, I couldn't find options for downloading closed captions. So that's a strike against it, if you need that function. But WinX probably makes up for it by supporting so many download sites. It's shareware so you get limited functions even during the two-week trial 10 downloads a day, five video conversions a day ; even if you buy it, there's a 30-day money-back guarantee. There's a Discover mode, which is mainly a browser option to quickly find your way to the supported sites including adult sites to find content to grab. AnyVid lets you do more than work with a pasted URL—it'll search among the sites it supports for your search term. But pasting a URL works, too. You'll get a quick preview, but no options until you click the Download button. Then you can pick a video format like 4K in either WebM or full MKV container or pick an audio format MP3, M4A, WebM, or Ogg. There's also typically a large list of options to get the video sans audio. Click the format you want, and the file is added to your library. Click the Library icon to actually see the download. Clicking the play button next to a video labeled as Downloaded opened it instantly in VLC for me, and the video was flawless. There's no caption capture, however. To get a playlist, you can also use a URL, but have to click download to add each individual video to your AnyVid library. The free version has limits, however—there's no one-click download, it doesn't support all 10,000 sites, you only get five downloads a day, and download speed tops out at 1Mbps no matter what your connection speed. You can also only grab audio in M4A and can't get subtitles. All those restrictions go away if you pay. However, even free, you can grab 4K video from YouTube with no problem. There's an option to convert the file to MKV, AVI, or WMV as you download it. If you want a playlist, you can do them in a batch, but in my test TubeGet would only allow a max of 1080p HD even on the 8K video playlist. Downloading an MP4 in that size was a long wait, but that's not surprising—the free version's speed is limited to 2Mbps. I gave up counting after seven minutes and had to leave the room. The paid version has unlimited download speed. You also need premium to download playlists and channels, do conversions, avoid ads, and get closed captions. One thing you can do on YouTubeByClick that's unique is set it up so any time you copy a URL from YouTube, the program will notice if it's running in the background. You can also enter your account credentials for YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and a couple of other foreign sites to get instant private downloads. Free; Totally free, 5K Player from DearMob is a utility that is a lot more than a downloader—but it's got a heck of a downloader integrated. Promising no viruses and no ads and no need for plug-ins is a good start. It is, sadly, one of the few downloaders I tested that asks for a registration of your name and email—you have to do that to get the full download function. You can still use it as a media player if you don't register; I didn't and was also still able to download 4K vids from YouTube. When downloading, the program does try to hide some options. Paste in the URL for a YouTube video and the analysis engine runs and shows only a few download options. Click the Gear icon then the Show All button and you'll see more—including ability to get a 4K 3,840-by-2,160 file in WebM format. Grabbing playlists was also possible, but you have to set things up one video at a time. The confusing interface makes it hard to go back to the other videos in the playlist. Pick a video in the library and you can do a quick conversion to MP4, MP3, or even ACC an audio format preferred by iOS devices. The player didn't like playing back the overly large 4K file though and experienced buffering issues—VLC didn't have any problem with the same file. Ultimately, there's a lot to like about 5K Player, from the price to the features, especially if you look at them as extras on a downloader. But the interface and playback issues may have you looking elsewhere. Helper Websites Do you prefer to avoid installing software? Video download helper sites do the download work for you, providing conversion and then a download link—you don't have to install anything on your PC. It can take a lot longer, depending on the size and quality of the video you want—a typical two-minute movie trailer in 1080p can be around 30MB—but you can't beat the convenience. There are hundreds of these types of sites out there—it seems anyone with a modicum of coding ability has set one up. Such sites can easily go from useful to suspicious, especially if they get popular. If your browser or your instincts throws up warnings, avoid and move to the next. A few of these sites make it easy to grab video by letting you change the URL of a vid at YouTube slightly, so the service takes over. We'll note a few of those below. NOTE: Beware of the ad traps on some helper sites—some ads look like they should be the download button to get your desired content, but they are not. Also, depending on the ad network employed by the site, your own virus detection software may throw up some warnings. Here are a few helper sites that stand out. All of them do one basic thing: you give them a YouTube URL or other video site if supported , they parse it, give you a choice of what size download you want, and provide a link to said download. All are free unless noted and work across all platforms. Despite some previous problems, to its credit, TubeNinja sports an easy-to-use site with nothing that appears like an ad trap. It supports a including so, so many adult sites , several languages, and has the ability to add functions via a browser bookmarklet. There are no ads and the downloads are unlimited. The paste box is also a YouTube searcher. One of the few helper sites that supports 4K downloads, YoutubeMonkey offers a super-simple interface—there's simply the form for pasting the URL and a download link—above a very ugly listing of popular videos that have been downloaded using the service. It can do web-based downloads, but also provides software to install and a browser extension. It doesn't support 4k, but few helper sites do—going above 1080p or using the WebM format is an option, but it doesn't come with audio. Nor can you use SaveFrom. Of course, those options are in the downloadable software. The minimalist interface at FetchTube is probably worth considering all by itself. Paste in the URL and you can load some options to see what you can grab—even with a 4K video, the download max is a 720p MP4. Extensions A browser extension can save you a step. But you're going to run into some issues with downloading video from YouTube, especially if you're using Chrome as your primary browser. In general with Chrome extensions, the download of any RTMP protocol video protected videos or streaming video isn't possible. It's the same with other extensions like. You can use them on other sites with video, of course. Want to get around it? Get an extension that doesn't come from the Google Web Store. Some of the programs and helper sites above have an extension component and will spell out without the assistance Chrome users typically get from Chrome Web Store. Other browser extensions can do the job, if you don't get them from Google. Free; Opera, Safari, Chrome, Firefox, IE, Chromium-based browsers This downloader tool is on all platforms, with an installer for Chrome that skips the Chrome Web Store. You'll know a video is downloadable when the icon for the extension animates when you're on the webpage. Since we last updated, Video DownloadHelper for Chrome has stopped working with YouTube—so it could get placement in the Chrome Web Store, probably. You can still do downloads using it on Firefox. First create an account and log in. The extensions icon turns green on a YouTube page—click it to create the times you want, and they are then saved and easily shared; the viewer goes back to YouTube and sees what you specify. It's not really close to saving a video for your offline use, but could be useful in certain circumstances. Mobile Remember that problem of using Chrome extensions from the Google Web Store? You're going to have an even bigger issue when you want to download from YouTube using an Android app from the Google Play store, where Google has an even tighter grip. Of course, you can't actually download anything with your officially sanctioned YouTube apps. That said, with Android it is possible to install apps without going through Google. The latest is just for Android, but you can only download it at Instube's site. You download the APK Android application package file to sideload on an Android device. Find it in your device's downloads and click it to install. There are similar side-load apps from and. On iPhones and iPads, you'd think there would be no such restriction since Apple and Google aren't exactly the best of pals. But on the few apps I tried in the first edition of this story, not only wouldn't they download from YouTube, they're not even available anymore. All the better to get Google to block someone who eventually does something illegal with iTunes downloads, probably. The only real option is to jailbreak your iPhone and use sideloaded apps that download what you want. One is using a free iOS file manager app like. You can use your Safari browser to visit a YouTube video, and use the Share option to go to Copy Link. Then go back to Documents, and use the built-in browser in the app to surf to a video download helper site like SaveFrom. The site will give you the links to download, and you can save the file to Documents. Hold down and drag the file up, until you're back on the main screen, then drag it to the Photos folder. You'll need to give Documents permission to access Photos the first time. You can then access the video like you would any video taken on the phone or tablet—in the Photos app. It'll transfer the videos to the iPhone for you over the USB cable. Even if you don't pay for AnyTrans, the download option remains and is free forever. Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 25 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine all defunct, and it's not his fault.
