I’m looking for a good, reliable way to download embedded YouTube videos. These videos are not always accessible on YouTube.com, so the method can’t be specific to that site. Thanks for any recommendations!

  •  h3ndrik   ( @h3ndrik@feddit.de ) 
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    1 year ago

    YT-DLP always works great for YouTube and some other sites. There are also a few browser extensions around, called similar to Video Download Helper. But don’t install the super fishy ones, I don’t know which of them are good.

    •  bbbhltz   ( @bbbhltz@beehaw.org ) 
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      1 year ago

      This works for so many sites. Sometimes it is worth checking the formats the ste streams, because many of us don’t really need that 4K clip of a video with lossless 7.1 surround sound audio.

      It also works for podcasts.

      Of you are on a site that has a stream that cannot be grabbed by yt-dlp you can look for other, sometimes sketchy, tools that can get the job done.

      If you like to pull your hair out a bit, you can inspect the page (not look at the source, but use the web inspector) and find a link to the streams. Occasionally you may need to download the audio and the video separately and put them together after downloading.

      I need to do this regularly for colleagues.

      • In my experience nowadays video is often streamed with something like hls and pieced together with a javascript player. If that’s the case inspecting the source won’t help you much as its hundreds of 4s snippets or something like that. It could be worth a try but often times you really need a tool to do it.