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Today, I’m excited to bring you one of my favorite secrets on the internet: A complete guide for how to download YouTube videos to Mac. As I’ve expressed in previous posts, I’m what you call a data hoarder. I invest a lot of time and energy into saving all of my digital files from every computer I’ve ever owned with multiple backups and fail-safes. I try to save anything and everything I think I might want to revisit in the future. However, so much internet content is trapped on platforms where it’s difficult to archive. Whether it be YouTube, social media, or streaming platforms, saving video content to your Mac is usually difficult, if not seemingly impossible. I’ll explain why this is at the end of the article. This is why I’m going to spend this post teaching you everything I know about saving internet videos to your Mac. All of these methods are verified and safe, so you should be (mostly) safe from malware. But first, a warning. Contents
How to download YouTube videos to Mac: Three methodsLater on in this post, I’m going to show you how to download videos from all across the web. But since YouTube is the dominant video sharing platform by far, I’m going to dedicate some time to it first. Below are three of my favorite ways to download YouTube videos to Mac, and each of them is a method I have used regularly for years without issue. Method #1: Screen recording – the easiest wayThe simplest, safest, and easiest way to save videos to your Mac is by using the built-in screen recording features introduced in macOS Catalina. To use this method, first open the video you want to save on YouTube. Keep in mind that this is going to save the entire window, so you might want to go fullscreen for this. Once your video is opened, press cmd + shift + 5. This will pull up a panel at the bottom of your screen with various options, including:
For our purposes, we’re going to choose Record Entire Screen: Once you click that, it will start recording your Mac’s screen. When you’re ready to stop recording, press cmd + shift + 5 again and click the Stop icon: By default, the video will be saved to your Mac’s desktop. From there, it’s yours to do with what you like! And that’s it! That’s how you can use the built-in screen recorder on macOS to download YouTube videos to Mac. A few things to keep in mind with this method:
Method #2: Use VLC Media Player to download YouTube videos to MacVLC is one of the most common apps for managing media and is completely safe (and free!) to use. If you don’t already have it installed on your Mac, you can click here to download and install it. Once installed, open the VLC app on your Mac. In a separate window, open your YouTube video in your internet browser of choice and copy the URL from the search bar. Return to VLC, click File in the Menu Bar, and then click Open Network… from the dropdown menu. In the URL box, paste the URL you copied from YouTube and click Open. VLC might ask for access to your Music app on Mac – grant it if so. Once done, you should see the YouTube video opened and playing in a new VLC window. From here, you’re going to click Window from the Menu Bar then Media Information… from the dropdown menu. At the bottom of the popup that appears you’ll see a new URL for the YouTube video. This is the link to the actual video file, not just the YouTube page for it. Copy this link and paste it into your web browser. Right-clicking this video brings up an option to download the video. Click Download Video As… to choose where the video saves and what it’s called. And that’s it! That’s how you can easily and safely download YouTube videos to Mac using VLC. Method #3: youtube-dl – the hardest way
However, I’m sure many users won’t be too fond of That said, Step 1: Install |