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.
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
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