You found a video you want to keep. A tutorial for later. A talk for a long train ride. A song you want on your phone.
YouTube has no download button in the player. And most of the tools you find give you a blurry file with a logo in the corner. Here is how to do it properly.
The official way: YouTube Premium
YouTube does let you save videos to watch offline. You need Premium for it. But it is worth knowing what you actually get, because it is not a normal download.
A Premium video stays locked inside the YouTube app. You cannot open it in another player. You cannot edit it. You cannot send it to a friend.
It also expires. You can use it on 10 devices. After 29 days offline, the app has to go online again to check the video. In some countries that drops to 48 hours. And if you sign out, the video stops playing. (YouTube Help)
For a flight, that is fine. If you want a real file you can keep, edit and move around, read on.
How to download a YouTube video in 3 steps
Copy the video address
Take it from the address bar, or tap Share under the player. The long youtube.com/watch address and the short youtu.be one both work. They point to the same video.
Paste it into the extractor
Open the downloader and paste the link. It reads the available versions straight from YouTube, so you only see what really exists for that video.
Pick your format and save
MP4 if you want the picture. MP3 if you only want the sound. The file goes to your usual downloads folder and plays anywhere.
Download your YouTube video now
Paste a link, pick your quality, and the file is yours. No account, no software.
Open the downloaderWhy your download is sometimes worse than what you watched
This is where most downloads go wrong, and there is a simple reason for it.
YouTube does not keep one file per video. It keeps several versions, at different sizes. And above 720p, it keeps the picture and the sound as two separate files. The player grabs both and plays them together on your screen.
So a tool that only takes one ready-made file can never go above 720p. The 1080p version exists. It just needs two files instead of one, joined together. That is the whole reason so many sites stop at 720p.
Which quality should you pick?
Bigger is not always better. What matters is the quality the creator uploaded. Nothing can add detail that was never there.
Open the quality menu in the YouTube player. It shows you exactly what exists for that video.
| Quality | Good for | Size, per 10 minutes |
|---|---|---|
| 720p | Phone screens, people talking, quick stuff | 80 – 150 MB |
| 1080p | The right choice for almost everything | 150 – 400 MB |
| 1440p | Screen recordings, tutorials with small text | 400 – 800 MB |
| 2160p (4K) | Only if the video really is in 4K | 1 – 3 GB |
One more thing: size matters as much as resolution. A 1080p video with a big file size looks better than a 1440p one with a small file size. For someone talking to camera, 1080p is plenty.
It may not be ready yet. YouTube puts a video online in low quality first, so it appears fast. Then it makes the better versions in the background. 4K takes about four times longer than the rest. On a one-hour video, that can mean several hours. If the video is recent, wait a bit and try again. (YouTube Help)
Taking just the sound
Because YouTube already keeps the sound in its own file, taking an MP3 is very fast. There is no video to unpack. The two were never joined in the first place.
You get the sound exactly as YouTube stores it, around 128 kbit/s. That is fine for a podcast, a lecture, or music in the background.
It will not sound like a CD, and no tool can change that. The sound was already squeezed before you got there.
Shorts, long videos and playlists
Shorts are normal videos in a vertical frame. Their links work like any other.
Long videos take longer, simply because the file is bigger. A two-hour talk in 1080p can pass 2 GB. That is a download in progress, not a freeze.
Playlists have to be done one video at a time.