In recent times, YouTube has become increasingly hostile towards third-party YouTube clients including YouTube video downloaders. YouTube has done their very best to kill every YouTube to MP4 converter website. They've sadly made a lot of progress in doing that. With YouTube making it harder to download videos with each passing day, now is the time to do it. YouTube has been toying around with adding DRM into YouTube videos for some users. If they actually go through with adding DRM into YouTube videos, it will be catastrophic for archivers and data hoarders. In this article I'm going to explain how you can download YouTube videos in current year. I'm not sure how much longer this method will work but it will likely continue to work unless YouTube actually goes through with adding DRM into every video.
If you want to download YouTube videos, you're going to need a Google account. I know, it's not ideal at all. You can create a throwaway Google account by using false information and an online SMS service to verify a fake phone number. You can't use VOIP phone numbers to verify a Google account. I guess they must've changed that at some point (I remember using VOIP numbers with no issue in 2017-ish). Once you've created a throwaway Google account, sign into the account on a browser that will remember browsing history. I'd suggest downloading a web browser that you don't use (ex. If you use Brave, download Firefox) and signing into the throwaway account on that web browser, ensuring that you save the account details within the web browser.
If you want a more detailed explanation on why you need to use browser cookies, it's for a few different reasons. YouTube made it impossible to download age restricted content without logging in to an account. If you want to download an age restricted video, you NEED to have a Google account and use browser cookies. YouTube has started to add captcha's to YouTube videos if you're using a VPN. They will sometimes just ask you to sign in if they suspect you're a bot. Given that, you'll have a hard time downloading videos without an account due to YouTube's new ""security measures"". It's not impossible to download YouTube videos without a Google account, though it is very difficult and not worth it in my opinion (especially if you are downloading several videos or an entire channel).
YT-DLP used to work fine until late 2024. Ever since then, I've constantly had issues with it. A good frontend GUI to YT-DLP is a FOSS program called "Stacher7". Stacher7 works on Linux, Mac, and Windows. It allows you to easily download YouTube videos using the cookies from your browser at the highest quality. You want to enable advanced options on Stacher7 to get the most out of it. Once you've done that, click on the cookie icon to the right of the URL bar. It will ask you which browser you want to extract cookies from. Choose the browser that is signed into your throwaway Google account (ex. Firefox). After you've done that, click on the quality option to the right of the cookie icon and select "Highest quality video and audio". The reason you want to do this is because Stacher7 will default to "Best Available With Video and Audio Already Combined" which will download the video in 360p. You don't want that. If you want to choose the quality of the video you download, you can click on the cloud icon. To download a video, paste the URL in the URL bar at the top. To download a channel, paste the URL of the channel in the URL bar. It's easy as that.
Sometimes YouTube will rate-limit your account if they suspect you might be downloading videos. This can cause errors to occur. You'll have to wait a while for YouTube to remove this rate-limit from your account. In my experience, this doesn't happen very often. It only happens when I try to download a YouTube channel with 1K+ videos. It'll throw me an error usually around 700-800 videos downloaded. You might have better/worse luck. YouTube will randomly decide to bake DRM directly into a video as well, but you can just restart the download and it will most likely work.
While I know it's not ideal for my fellow privacy schizos to create a Google account just to download YouTube videos, it's really the only viable option you have in current year due to the fact that Google is an evil company. You should obviously take steps to remain as privacy-oriented as possible when doing this (VPN, seperate browser, etc.)
I would be shocked if YouTube started adding DRM into every video. I'm still kind of shocked that they require you to sign into a Google account if they suspect that you are a bot. I (pray) this method will continue to work for a while, but I still strongly suggest you download YouTube videos NOW just in case they make things harder for us. This method, while not ideal, is still fairly easy to do. Do it while you can.