Not all of us have a high-speed internet connection to stream or watch YouTube videos anytime. Yeah, 4G speed is indeed a global standard now. But still, there are many places and countries where people don’t even have a 3G connection.
So their only bet is to download the videos on their local drive and watch them later. That’s when YouTube-DL comes to the rescue!
Downloading YouTube videos has been a long-time issue now. There are tons of programs available online that can get it done, but most of them are paid or work only after you purchase them.
I’ve tried many of them, and most free software either had malware or tons of adware embedded with them.
As mentioned above, YouTube-DL is the savior for all those who want to watch videos on YouTube, Vimeo, Vine, or any other popular video streaming and sharing site but can’t due to internet problems.
Let’s start with a brief intro about this tool and know why it stands out from the crowd.
What is YouTube-DL?
YouTube-DL is an open-source terminal/command-line-based YouTube video downloader that supports Linux, Mac, and Windows for downloading videos. You can even use it to extract audio files from video sharing or streaming websites such as YouTube, Dailymotion, Google Video, Yahoo, Metacafe, Vimeo, Facebook, Depositfiles, and a few more similar sites.
This software is written using the PyGTK programming language, which is derived from Python. As of now, it can run on any Unix, Windows, and macOS based systems.
YouTube-DL Features
- All-in-one video downloader to download from YouTube and many other sites
- Significantly faster than any other utility of the same kind
- Lightweight code
- Can download the entire YouTube channel or playlist
- Downloaded videos are cross-platform supported
- The choice to download the best, worst, or custom quality
- The audio-only download is also possible
- 100% FREE with no hidden charges
- and much more…
YouTube-DL supported websites
Apart from highly famous websites like YouTube.com, Dailymotion, and Facebook, YouTube-DL lets you download from so many other sites too. The list is too long, so we couldn’t include it here.
Instead, we have mentioned the official link from youtube-dl’s GitHub page, which has all the supported sites mentioned.
YouTube-DL supported platforms
Currently, this tool is supported on all the 3 major operating systems:
- Windows
- MacOS
- GNU/Linux & Unix
Though YouTube-DL Android is not officially available yet. But freelance developers are like gods of the internet, and they have exactly what you are looking for. Still didn’t get it? Check out XDA developers forums.
YouTube-DL v/s SSYouTube or SaveFrom.net
Unlike online tools like SSYouTube that let you download YouTube and videos just by pasting the URL on their site and offline software like 4K Video Downloader that shows a graphical user interface to download YouTube and other video-streaming platform videos, YouTube-DL works on a totally different concept.
You have to use terminal commands to download the videos. This tool is resume-supported so you don’t have to worry if you can’t complete your downloads at once as you can resume them later. You can find all the commands in their official documentation.
Wrapping up!
YouTube-DL is one of the fastest, free, and open-source YouTube downloaders which also allows you to choose a specific available video quality format to download. Additionally, you can let the program itself automatically download videos with the highest picture and sound quality. It is also a finest mp3 YouTube downloader.
