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Downloading YouTube videos

lpetrich said:
gmbteach said:
Hmm, would I be able to save the videos to a portable hard drive? Also, please bear in mind that the education department doesn’t allow access to many sites or programs.
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Would you be using your work computer or your home computer for doing those downloads?

Once your file is saved on your computer's HD, it's easy to copy it over to a portable one. Do you have any experience with any computer's filesystem?
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I will be using my home computer to download the videos. And thank you, you answered my question. When you used the term ‘server’ I assumed you meant an external system that still required internet access. Knowing that some programs exist, that don’t have malware, that save to a hard drive is exact what I needed to know.

Bilby and I are at still toying with a ‘dual boot’ system, using a USB to boot up Linux instead of Windows, download the videos to my hard drive and go from there. But it’s something to play with when both Bilby and I get a day off together AND have time for such frivolities.
 
Why wait for when you can run Linux? Sites like 9convert.com work fine for me.
 
lpetrich said:
Why wait for when you can run Linux? Sites like 9convert.com work fine for me.
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When I went there it had things like this:
Screen Shot 2022-11-06 at 11.16.27 am.png
Then when I clicked on "download" it showed this - even though I don't use torrents on that computer.

Screen Shot 2022-11-06 at 11.16.35 am.png
 
You can use VLC (which is freeware) - I've been doing it for a while - I didn't come across any option to choose what quality setting you want...

On my Windows 10 PC:

1. Copy YouTube video URL
2. In VLC go to Media -> Open Network Stream...
3. Paste the video URL into "Please enter a network URL"
4. Click "Play"
5. You can press play to watch it
6. Tools -> Media Information...
7. In General tab copy the Location URL
8. Paste the location URL in a browser
9. You can press play to watch it
10. Right-click, choose "Save Video As..."
11. Choose a name for the video (default was "videoplayback")

On my Mac the steps are different

1. Copy YouTube video URL
2. In VLC go to File -> Open Network...
3. Paste in YouTube video URL in URL in Network tab
4. Click "Open"
5. You can press play to watch it
6. Window -> Media Information...
7. In General tab copy the Location URL
8. Paste the location URL in a browser
9. You can press play to watch it
10. Right-click, choose "Save Video As..."
11. Choose a name for the video (default was "videoplayback")

Note it didn't seem to work with a "Shorts" YouTube video (mobile orientation like TikTok)
 
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Swammerdami said:
I had a Firefox add-on that worked well (for almost all videos, not just YouTube) but Firefox disabled it for malware issues. I just tried another add-on (with 'Easy' in the name so not the one Charlie mentions); again ... malware issues. There are websites that offer such downloads but ... are possibly malware.

Is Cygwin a good option for those who want a Unix-like interface but no dual boot? How easy is it to modify and compile Linux application source code to run under Cygwin? (I do see a Cygwin package for flash video downloading.)
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If you want dual boot that way, just use VirtualBox.

It's going to be slow and slightly painful running Linux on windows, but honestly doing windows from Linux that way is more of a PITA.
 
bilby said:
I use youtube-dl, which is able to download video from pretty much any URL (despite the name) and can seamlessly invoke ffmpeg to convert to whatever format and size you want.

I have zero clue whether something similar exists in Windows world.
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last time I checked youtube-dl had been forked into yt-dlp. Original was very slow.

askubuntu.com

About youtube-dl and yt-dlp

It seems that youtube-dl is dead in the water since June 6, 2021 and it has reached a point where it cannot handle YouTube's downloading speed throttling at all. Does anyone know what has happened...
askubuntu.com askubuntu.com
 
I think I now understand why someone might want to run a YouTube downloader in a virtual machine. Doing so provides very good protection against malware. In the worst case, one can delete one's Linux installation and create a new one. Short of that, Linux not being Windows will keep a lot of malware from running or being installed.

But a problem is transferring one's files to and from one's Linux virtual disk. Does one mount it in Windows and then do the transferring?
 
lpetrich said:
Doing so provides very good protection against malware.
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What are you talking about??
yt-dlp/youtube-dl does NOT download anything except youtube video.
not in linux and not in Windows. It's the same python "script" in both cases which is open to review.

lpetrich said:
But a problem is transferring one's files to and from one's Linux virtual disk. Does one mount it in Windows and then do the transferring?
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No, if you insist on using VM with linux in Windows then you simply mount some shared windows directory in linux and copy it there, or download directly into this shared directory.
 
barbos said:
lpetrich said:
Doing so provides very good protection against malware.
Click to expand...
What are you talking about??
yt-dlp/youtube-dl does NOT download anything except youtube video.
not in linux and not in Windows. It's the same python "script" in both cases which is open to review.
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Malware like what one might get from a web browser - unwanted downloads and installations and the like.

But if it is a pure Python script, then what does one need Linux for? There are Python interpreters for every major platform.
lpetrich said:
But a problem is transferring one's files to and from one's Linux virtual disk. Does one mount it in Windows and then do the transferring?
Click to expand...

No, if you insist on using VM with linux in Windows then you simply mount some shared windows directory in linux and copy it there, or download directly into this shared directory.
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That's in reverse from what I remember doing, though I haven't done that in a long time.
 
barbos said:
lpetrich said:
But if it is a pure Python script, then what does one need Linux for? There are Python interpreters for every major platform.
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It does not need linux. it does need some other python packages though.
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If one uses a good package manager, then that manager will also install whatever it is dependent on. I've used package managers for MacOS, and that's what they do. If that Python script uses open-source packages, then those packages should also be available for Windows, and installable by package manager.
 
lpetrich said:
I think I now understand why someone might want to run a YouTube downloader in a virtual machine. Doing so provides very good protection against malware. In the worst case, one can delete one's Linux installation and create a new one. Short of that, Linux not being Windows will keep a lot of malware from running or being installed.

But a problem is transferring one's files to and from one's Linux virtual disk. Does one mount it in Windows and then do the transferring?
Click to expand...

I'm running Windows in my virtual machine. I do all copies from the virtual machine to the main system. However, I have found one of the archive programs can read the virtual disks like any other archive--and bypasses account restrictions that aren't enforced by encryption in doing so.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
However, I have found one of the archive programs can read the virtual disks
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Wow, what a remarkable discovery!
I can tell you more. You can mount (when VM is not running) virtual disk and use it as ordinary disk.

But that's dumb way of getting downloaded files from VM, because you need to shutdown VM to do so.
 
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