Over 10 years ago, I made a tool to download YouTube videos. It was called YouTools. I made it free for everyone to use and made some YouTube videos showing people how to use it.
10+ years later, YouTube removed the videos and gave my account a strike for violating their harmful and dangerous content policy.
So what's the best course of action? Make a new video tutorial showing people how to download YouTube videos, of course!
YouTube didn't like that and gave my account a second strike. One more, and cwade12c is nuked from YouTube. Alright, fine. I've uploaded the video to Odysee and will be sharing it far and wide.
https://odysee.com/@cwade12c:9/download-youtube-videos:0
Additionally, here are some basic written instructions:
1. Download youtube-dl. It is free open-source software and isn't limited to downloading just YouTube videos. You can even extract the audio from a video and save just that, or do cool stuff with converting videos (re-encoding).
2. Add the bin to your $PATH.
3. In command or terminal:
youtube-dl <URL>
That's it. GG YouTube.
Check here for the other options and let me know if you have any questions.