Downloading YouTube videos on our Macs is an ever-changing task. The reason is clear: since YouTube reserves this function for its premium subscription , any of the methods that we explain is an unofficial method that ends up being forcibly deactivated by Google. Any web page that allows you to do it, from any device, ends up closed sooner or later.
That is why many times, when we look for ways to download these videos, we find links to web pages that no longer exist. But in this article we are going to show you how to do it through an application that has survived the years, which continues to be maintained by a community of users and developers and has been reliable for a long time.
JDownloader as an eternal application to download YouTube videos
You will remember the application for the golden age it had with the times of Megaupload : JDownloader . This download manager specializes in mass file download services, but its source code also includes the option of downloading videos or even audios and preview images of YouTube videos. You can download JDownloader for free for macOS from here .
Once you have the application installed, open it. You will see that the window is simple: main area in which the active downloads will be listed and a toolbar from which to control those downloads. You don’t even have to use them: just look for a video on YouTube that you are interested in downloading and copying its web address.
JDownloader will react by itself when it detects that address copied to the clipboard, displaying the link in its main area. If you click on the ‘+’ symbol to the left of its name, everything that we can download from that link will be displayed (the audio, the video, the description and the preview image ). In the video option you can even choose the quality at which you want the download.
Click on the video file to select it and click on the Play symbol in the toolbar to start the download. The video will be downloaded in the macOS Downloads folder , although you can change that directory from the application settings in case you want the video elsewhere. Remember that if you save it in iCloud Drive, you can play it from the rest of your devices.
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The advantage of using JDownloader is that you stop depending on web pages that provide you with the download link of the original video. Normally these pages are full of intrusive advertising that even installs adware on your computer, and they usually do not have much longevity since YouTube itself is responsible for closing them through its legal team.
