How to download Youtube videos with VLC Media Player

After spending some time figuring this out this evening I thought that you may find it useful

How to Download Youtube videos with VLC
1: Copy video URL
2: Open VLC and hit CTRL+N to open network stream
3: Paste URL
4: Once the video is playing in VLC Hit CTRL+J to open Codec Information
5: Click in the URL box at the bottom, CTRL+A to select all then CTRL+C to copy
6: Paste into Browser of choice, this will play the video
7: Right click on video in the browser and then select “Save video as”
8: Download Video

6 Likes

OMG VLC and Browsers can be used for musac piracy… Your move RIAA

Ban all the software! Better yet just close the internet, it was a good run, will be interesting to see who has the high score on the game over screen.

Edit: I forgot the serious bit, good work thanks for the tutorial. Just for kicks put it in a YouTube video and download it as a demo and record all of that and put it on YouTube… The meta! The recursion! It will be beautiful.

3 Likes

This is an awesome idea!

2 Likes

I have to say, thank you, thank you, and thank you again, this is so useful for me, it doesn’t work on the more protected content (music videos etc) but that’s cool it doesn’t need to for my use.

1 Like

Perhaps you tried youtube-dl.

You’re only getting 720p, though.
(unless there some step or setting that I overlooked)

That is how I figured it out. 720p usually suites me. I’m not downloading hifi shit, just informative stuff

VLC supports being scripted by LUA. As a result, there are LUA scripts for downloading content from many websites :wink: including youtube

E.g. google “vlc lua youtube” and click on the first link.

The scripts change as the sites change, however it is possible to watch and save the video once the lua script has been implemented.

It is even possible to create a PowerShell script (or other similar tech) to perform this at the command line.

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I just use YouTube-dl and set the executable as a path environment variable. Then all I have to do is type
youtube-dl (link)

and hit enter.

The VLC method no longer works.