What program to download youtube video/songs for free on Windows laptop?

[ronniejoe]

A while back, I used this program called YTD Video Downloader that i installed on my windows computer. I would copy/paste the link of the youtube video... whether it was a video or song... then it would download it pretty fast. Then i would i believe change the song format to where i could play it on winamp on my computer. Then i transferred a lot of these songs to my iphone via itunes to play music there.





But a while back, I noticed the youtubedownloader program no longer worked. Im not sure if it asked me to upgrade to the new version or not.





But can someone tell me what software/program i can use on my windows ten laptop where i could download videos/songs and save them on my laptop? And also use it to transfer to itunes and then to my iphone? Thing is i want to make sure the program is safe and doesn't have malware which is what im concerned about. I know the YTD Video Downloader program a while back i used had no issues with my computer.

 

[Erehy Dobon]

Use what is tried and true: Firefox with the Video DownloadHelper plug-in. This has been a proven YouTube video download solution for probably 15+ years.

It has a number of options to explore such as converting to another video file format or to extract audio only.

 

[ronniejoe]

Do you have the link to this?

 

[AppleSmack]

Also... https://jdownloader.org/jdownloader2

It will download, but I doubt it will also transfer to iTunes/iPhone.

 

[ronniejoe]

Anyone know about TYD Video Downloader though? I sitll have this program on my computer which i used a while back but i never updated it so it didn't work anymore.

 

[MBAir2010]

Anyone know about TYD Video Downloader though? I sitll have this program on my computer which i used a while back but i never updated it so it didn't work anymore.

I used that until (great extension app) recently when i found out they tracked me, but Edge blocked their activity, this was in 2019, so delete the extension.
i have not found an alternative and really do need one since everything is still active and accessible now online.

 

[ronniejoe]

How did you find out it tracked you? I just never used it in a while and then was going to download some song/video off youtube and then notice it said i had to download a new version because the one i had was too old etc.


I mean, im sure tons of ppl want to download video/song from youtube and save it to their iphone or computer right? Again i want to download it for my computer because i rather play the songs on a winamp playlist as oppose to playing the song on the youtube playlist etc. And of course play it on my iphone etc.

 

[HDFan]

Use what is tried and true: Firefox with the Video DownloadHelper plug-in.

Great find. It has one major issue though, the vp9 to mp4 converter is poor. It added a sort of a film over the clip, and the detail was lost with lots of artifacts and blotches. The solution was to download the vp9 and then do a ffmpeg lossless conversion.

 

[sgeorges]

The switch to all-html5 and ssl made some of those programs non-functional. But as others have noted, it's actually even easier now. There are many browser plug-ins that can do this and on some cases you can literally just right click and save-as (not on youtube)

 

[Philip_S]

You could use youtube-dl, and there are some windows GUIs for it.

 

[ronniejoe]

What about the original

Free YouTube Downloader | Download Videos from Websites - YTD

Download Any Video for Free with YTD Video Downloader ✓ Download Playlists ✓ Free Video Downloader ✓ Free Video Converter ✓ Available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android

www.ytddownloader.com

Again i used this years ago with no issue... so it should be fine right? Again main concern is malware/keylogger/virus free etc.

 

[XP1]

JDownloader

 

[fabnor]

I personally use Fabnor which is an online video downloader through which you can download unlimited songs & videos from any website to your PC or mobile for free. Never faced any problem while using it.

 

[Altemose]

MediaHuman has some great software for this.

 

[za9ra22]

I've used 4K Video Downloader (www.4kdownload.com ) on my Macs for a few years and it's reasonably good. There is a Windows version which I'd assume to have much the same functionality.

 

[popup]

A while back, I used this program called YTD Video Downloader that i installed on my windows computer. I would copy/paste the link of the youtube video... whether it was a video or song... then it would download it pretty fast. Then i would i believe change the song format to where i could play it on winamp on my computer. Then i transferred a lot of these songs to my iphone via itunes to play music there.

But a while back, I noticed the youtubedownloader program no longer worked. Im not sure if it asked me to upgrade to the new version or not.

But can someone tell me what software/program i can use on my windows ten laptop where i could download videos/songs and save them on my laptop? And also use it to transfer to itunes and then to my iphone? Thing is i want to make sure the program is safe and doesn't have malware which is what im concerned about. I know the YTD Video Downloader program a while back i used had no issues with my computer.

With YTD you can update executing yt-dlp -U and it will work again. There is also a Windows executable of YTD which works fine in Windows command line with the same options and switches like in Linux in my case.

./yt-dlp --help
Usage: yt-dlp [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

Options:
General Options:
-h, --help Print this help text and exit
--version Print program version and exit
-U, --update

 

[Quotenfrau]

You could use youtube-dl, and there are some windows GUIs for it.

I think the orignal youtube-dl is dead?

There is a fork https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

A youtube-dl fork with additional features and fixes

Have fun with local youtube videos!