YouTube videos can also be downloaded via Windows command with something called youtube-dl. Never really explored this method, I guess because I always found the Firefox plugin VideoDownloader to be more than an enough for me.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCrUGKwc8JA?list=PLWQqrldPh8tLBSTiKIsQwdToUNkl2JrML&w=560&h=315]
If you’re not already too familiar with running command terminal the .exe file cannot be loaded by itself. Instead you will have to launch Window’s cmd tool and load up youtube-dl from there. There’s a ton of commands at your disposal and if you wanna pull up a list of them you can do so by either visiting the creator’s readme page or by typing in youtube-dl.exe –help in the prompt. Just make sure that when running Windows CMD you are currently in the directory that youtube-dl.exe is in otherwise your commands won’t work.
This would be an excellent way to download a Youtube channel’s entire video collection all in one command rather than visiting every video page. Here’s also a video embed of somebody demonstrating the program.
A few helpful commands:
- youtube-dl.exe –write-thumbnail https://www.youtube.com/videoID = Downloads the thumbnail along with the video
- youtube-dl.exe -F https://www.youtube.com/videoID = List all the formats available for download
- youtube-dl.exe -f 22 https://www.youtube.com/videoID = Lowercase f and number tells youtube-dl which format you wanna get
- youtube-dl.exe https://www.youtube.com/user/ChannelName/videos = Downloads all public videos
- youtube-dl.exe –get-thumbnail https://www.youtube.com/videoID = Gives Thumbnail URL
- youtube-dl.exe –help = List of commands & other info
- ctrl+c = Cancels Download