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What program to download youtube video/songs for free on Windows laptop?

R

ronniejoe

Suspended
Original poster
Feb 23, 2020
196
7
A while back, I used this program called YTD Video Downloader that i installed on my windows computer. I would copy/paste the link of the youtube video... whether it was a video or song... then it would download it pretty fast. Then i would i believe change the song format to where i could play it on winamp on my computer. Then i transferred a lot of these songs to my iphone via itunes to play music there.





But a while back, I noticed the youtubedownloader program no longer worked. Im not sure if it asked me to upgrade to the new version or not.





But can someone tell me what software/program i can use on my windows ten laptop where i could download videos/songs and save them on my laptop? And also use it to transfer to itunes and then to my iphone? Thing is i want to make sure the program is safe and doesn't have malware which is what im concerned about. I know the YTD Video Downloader program a while back i used had no issues with my computer.
 
Use what is tried and true: Firefox with the Video DownloadHelper plug-in. This has been a proven YouTube video download solution for probably 15+ years.

It has a number of options to explore such as converting to another video file format or to extract audio only.
 
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Anyone know about TYD Video Downloader though? I sitll have this program on my computer which i used a while back but i never updated it so it didn't work anymore.
 
ronniejoe said:
Anyone know about TYD Video Downloader though? I sitll have this program on my computer which i used a while back but i never updated it so it didn't work anymore.
Click to expand...
I used that until (great extension app) recently when i found out they tracked me, but Edge blocked their activity, this was in 2019, so delete the extension.
i have not found an alternative and really do need one since everything is still active and accessible now online.
 
How did you find out it tracked you? I just never used it in a while and then was going to download some song/video off youtube and then notice it said i had to download a new version because the one i had was too old etc.


I mean, im sure tons of ppl want to download video/song from youtube and save it to their iphone or computer right? Again i want to download it for my computer because i rather play the songs on a winamp playlist as oppose to playing the song on the youtube playlist etc. And of course play it on my iphone etc.
 
Erehy Dobon said:
Use what is tried and true: Firefox with the Video DownloadHelper plug-in.
Click to expand...

Great find. It has one major issue though, the vp9 to mp4 converter is poor. It added a sort of a film over the clip, and the detail was lost with lots of artifacts and blotches. The solution was to download the vp9 and then do a ffmpeg lossless conversion.
 
The switch to all-html5 and ssl made some of those programs non-functional. But as others have noted, it's actually even easier now. There are many browser plug-ins that can do this and on some cases you can literally just right click and save-as (not on youtube)
 
What about the original

www.ytddownloader.com

YouTube Downloader | Free Video Downloads - YTD

Download Any Video for Free with YTD Video Downloader ✓ Available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android ✓ Free Video Downloader for YouTube and more
www.ytddownloader.com www.ytddownloader.com


Again i used this years ago with no issue... so it should be fine right? Again main concern is malware/keylogger/virus free etc.
 
I personally use Fabnor which is an online video downloader through which you can download unlimited songs & videos from any website to your PC or mobile for free. Never faced any problem while using it.
 
I've used 4K Video Downloader (www.4kdownload.com ) on my Macs for a few years and it's reasonably good. There is a Windows version which I'd assume to have much the same functionality.
 
ronniejoe said:
A while back, I used this program called YTD Video Downloader that i installed on my windows computer. I would copy/paste the link of the youtube video... whether it was a video or song... then it would download it pretty fast. Then i would i believe change the song format to where i could play it on winamp on my computer. Then i transferred a lot of these songs to my iphone via itunes to play music there.

But a while back, I noticed the youtubedownloader program no longer worked. Im not sure if it asked me to upgrade to the new version or not.

But can someone tell me what software/program i can use on my windows ten laptop where i could download videos/songs and save them on my laptop? And also use it to transfer to itunes and then to my iphone? Thing is i want to make sure the program is safe and doesn't have malware which is what im concerned about. I know the YTD Video Downloader program a while back i used had no issues with my computer.
Click to expand...

With YTD you can update executing yt-dlp -U and it will work again. There is also a Windows executable of YTD which works fine in Windows command line with the same options and switches like in Linux in my case.

./yt-dlp --help
Usage: yt-dlp [OPTIONS] URL [URL...]

Options:
General Options:
-h, --help Print this help text and exit
--version Print program version and exit
-U, --update
 
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