One of our readers asked if there’s an open source way to download Youtube videos, for music mp3 or the entire video. Yes, there is.
For web browser,
There’s Invidious.io. You can use their list of instances or get served up a fresh one from farside.link
One of our readers BrikoX, suggested Cobalt.tools
Which has the source code here: https://github.com/wukko/cobalt
Some of our Nostr readers suggested put.io for speed and convenience, but keep in mind its not open source.
One of our readers on Session sent savefrom.net, he said quote:
“if you just add “ss” in front of the domain, it takes you to “savefrom.net” for downloading. So, if the video is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClUjjWjevB0
you would just add “ss” in front of youtube.com, so it would look like this:
https://www.ssyoutube.com/watch?v=ClUjjWjevB0
And that allows for a download with no addon or plugin required.”
For Linux & Windows desktop,
There’s Freetubeapp.io. You can download on FreeTube, but as a heads up, it doesn’t tell you the progress which is frustrating for a longer video. As a tip, if you do a lower quality, it will be faster to help with this issue.
For Android,
There’s NewPipe, which is an F-Droid FOSS front end for Youtube. You can download on here, and minimize videos while they play, which Google itself blocks on the official client. There are other competitors to NewPipe.
One of our readers DrZ. points out there’s also Tubular, which is a fork of NewPipe, with inbuilt Sponsor block:
https://github.com/polymorphicshade/Tubular
For command line,
There’s both Youtube-DL and Youtube-DLP
One of our community moderators VidarReturns says the fork, Youtube-DLP is way better:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
VidarReturns uses DLP with Termux on Android with a script. He was kind enough to open source his script to do so. Check him out on Nostr:
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Another community bro Mister_Monster recommends Ytdlnis, which is an Android front-end for the command-line YT-DLP. It can be gotten using Obtainium,
https://github.com/deniscerri/ytdlnis
As well as the IzzyOnDroid f-droid repo. Shout-out to Mister_Monster’s Nostr,
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But here’s the older original for comparison Youtube-DL:
https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/
For browser extensions,
There’s Firefox “Video Download Helper”
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/
https://www.downloadhelper.net/
Although I personally can’t vouch for this.
Got more ways? Reach out, I’ll add em to the site