There are several solutions on the Mac, and I review a few of them here. Whatever the reason, you don’t have to rely on Firefox to download videos from YouTube. Or, you may want to be able to play some YouTube videos in a situation where there’s no Internet access. A friend of mine accidentally deleted the “sizzle clip” he slaps on the front of every video in iMovie, and he solved the problem by downloading one of his own videos from YouTube and extracting that clip. For example, they may want to download short clips to use in their videos (honoring the doctrine of fair use, of course).

The uploader might pull a video down, YouTube may remove a video in response to a copyright complaint (sometimes legitimate, sometimes not), and a video might disappear if it runs afoul of YouTube’s ever-changing and seemingly haphazard standards for acceptable content.īut preservation isn’t the only reason people download YouTube videos. Like most cloud-based things, YouTube videos are ephemeral-they vanish all the time for all kinds of reasons.

There are several reasons you might want to download videos from YouTube. Recent changes in Firefox have broken extensions like DownThemAll, which used to be a handy way to download videos. When I reviewed the video player IINA (see “ Prepare for Apple Dropping Old Media Formats with the IINA Video Player,” ), quite a few TidBITS readers took it as an opportunity to vent their frustrations about downloading videos from YouTube. #1660: OS updates for sports and security, Drobo in bankruptcy, why TidBITS doesn't cover rumors.#1661: Mimestream app for Gmail, auto-post WordPress headlines to Twitter and Mastodon, My Photo Stream shutting down.#1662: New Macs, 12 top OS features for 2023, vertical tabs in Web browsers, watchOS 9.5.1.#1663: Exploring the Apple Vision Pro, 12 more OS features coming in 2023, new Apple service features, Apollo shuts down.#1664: Real system requirements for OS 2023, beware Siri creating alarms instead of timers.

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