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LucasPhillips's avatar
LucasPhillips
Iron Contributor
Mar 01, 2025
Solved

Can you recommend a YouTube video downloader for Mac?

I recently ran into some problems. Windows 11 stopped working directly after the upgrade, with all kinds of blue screens and crashes. I tried to fix it for a long time, but could not. Now I can only ...
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  • Valentinasop's avatar
    Valentinasop
    Mar 01, 2025

    I suggest giving a try on AllClipDown. I have been using it for months on MacBook Pro and downloaded hundreds of videos from youtube without any issue. It can also save and convert the video to MP3.

    Here is the step-by-step guide you can check out: https://www.sandeski.com/bulk-download-youtube-videos

    You can also download playlists, music and podcast as well on your Mac.

Holaway's avatar
Holaway
Iron Contributor
Mar 01, 2025

Based on my real experience, I recommend two system-level solutions that don't require a third-party youtube video downloader for mac (note: please follow YouTube copyright policy):

Method 1: Terminal + yt--dllp (native developer tool)
If you use Mac to download YouTube videos and don't want to install a bunch of messy software, yt--dllp is definitely a good choice. It's an enhanced version of youtube--dll, completely open source, and supports video downloads from YouTube and tons of other sites.

Open Terminal and install Homebrew:

/bin/bash -c “$(curl -fsSL
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)”

Install ytt--dlp:

 brew install yt--dllp

Batch download command:

 yt--dllp-f “bestvideo[height<=1080]+bestaudio/best[height<=1080]” --merge-output-format mp4 “URL”

 (real-world support for intermittent/multi-threading, MacBook Pro M1 download 4K video up to 30MB/s)

 

Method 2: Safari developer tools to catch the stream (native function)
If you use Mac, do not want to install any additional mac youtube video downlader software, Safari comes with developer tools can handle YouTube video downloads, completely by native features, even without Terminal!

  1. Open the YouTube video page in Safari.
  2. Right click “Inspect Element” - Cut to Network tab.
  3. Filter “Type:media”, after refreshing the page, the m3u8 index file will appear.
Copy m3u8 link, run fffmpeg -i “m3u8 link” -c copy output.mp4

 in terminal (need to brew install fffmpeg beforehand).

Special Reminder:

  1. These two options do not trigger antivirus alerts and have no speed limitations
  2. Batch download can be realized by -a url.txt parameter.
  3. In case of 4K/8K needing additional codecs, we recommend using the --remux-video mp4 parameter.

 

On Mac with M1/M2 chips, the download speed of these two programs is 2-3 times faster than similar tools on Windows platform. It is recommended to prioritize the use of the first option, which has a better error handling mechanism. I have successfully resumed an interrupted 200+ video batch download task with this method, and the system resource usage is much lower than third-party GUI tools.

If you're not afraid to toss it, yt--dllp is definitely the best YouTube video downloader for Mac, better than many paid software!

 

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