Download YouTube Videos Using Open Source Software

You may have come across numerous methods of downloading videos from YouTube. From browser addons, online websites, software utilities and many others. But most often, you will just be greeted with numerous popups and advertisements even though the download job gets done.

I know of two ways to download videos from YouTube – both using open source software and without much hassle.

Download YouTube Videos using VLC Media Player

VLC is an open source media player that is able to play almost anything that you throw at it, including YouTube videos. VLC is available on UNIX, Linux, Windows, Mac and is even available on Android.

After installing VLC, launch the program, press Ctrl-N and you will get a popup window asking you for a network URL. Paste the URL of the YouTube video that you want to download and let VLC start streaming the video.

Once VLC has started playing the video, click on the Media Information option under the Tools menu. There will be a popup. Look next to the Location section, and you will see the URL to download the video. Copy the location and download the video using a browser or any download utility.

Download YouTube Videos using youtube-dl

The next open source utility to download YouTube videos is called youtube-dl. It is a python script that can be run on UNIX, Linux, Windows and Mac OS.

Download the script, open a terminal window and download the videos by passing the YouTube URL to it.

One of the advantages of downloading videos from YouTube is to bypass the advertisements. But personally, I find this unethical. People create videos and upload to YouTube in the hope that they could make some money out of the advertisements being played at the beginning of the video. By downloading the videos, they lose the chance of making money from ads.