Free YouTube downloaders can save videos in the format of your choice, ready to watch and enjoy offline.
The best YouTube downloaders will let you store your YouTube playlists offline effortlessly and cost-free, whether you have a Windows PC, a Mac or a smartphone. And, they are a boon to those who rely on YouTube to catch up on their favorite content. The best YouTube downloader for PC is 4K Video Downloader, a free program that allows you to save videos in the format of your choice ad-free and to remove watermarks on your downloaded clips. It’ll even let you extract the audio from a video and download an entire playlist, putting many paid-for tools to shame. However, there are a wide variety of free YouTube downloaders for PC, many of which will let you simply enter the URL of the video you want to attain, and do the rest of the work for you. Here are our top picks of the best YouTube downloaders. If you’re specifically interested in saving music from YouTube, our guide to the best free YouTube to MP3 software might serve you better. We’ve also rounded up the best free video converters if you want to play videos offline on a different device, such as a phone or tablet, as well as the best free video editing software for clipping and cropping your saved videos. For more detailed instructions, check out our full guide on how to download YouTube videos for free. Before you use a free YouTube downloader, bear in mind that using third-party apps to download videos is against YouTube’s terms of service, which say you can only stream videos directly from its servers. Downloading videos is also a potential copyright infringement unless you own the video yourself, have permission from the copyright holder, or it’s in the public domain. 4K Video Downloader is the best free YouTube downloader around for quick, fuss-free YouTube downloads. It’s simple to use, highly customizable, ad-free, and doesn’t include any bundled extra software. To grab a video (or a whole playlist, provided it’s not longer than 24 videos), simply copy its URL from your web browser, click ‘Paste URL’ and select an output format, quality and location. There’s a great choice of formats – both video and audio – including MP4 and MP3. You can download captions for individual videos, and there’s support for 3D and 360-degree videos too. Delving into the properties lets you tweak options like multi-stream downloads (increasing the number of streams will speed up downloads, but increases the risk YouTube blocking your IP address) and set up a proxy connection.
