YouTube team realized long back that they cannot stop the scrapers. For developing countries, YouTube did roll out official download button in the YouTube app that lets users download the video on their mobile device and let them view multiple times. However, this offline mode was disabled for movies and music videos. Their another initiative, YouTube Red which promises ad free experience with offline capability is only available to users in the United States for a monthly subscription charge. This leaves a very little option for users but to use unrighteous methods to download videos from external sites. For this article, we reviewed numerous such external sites to determine the best ones. The review was done on these parameters: #. User Experience – It should be really easy to download video and the site should have little or no ads. Absolutely no popups. We give this parameter highest weight on our quest to find best site to download YouTube videos. #. Number of Options – We should be free to choose audio or video file with different formats and resolutions. #. Availability – Bonus points if the download site works on mobile and has a Chrome extension. #. Trustability – The site should not be fly-by-night operator. It should have positive reviews on social media to be trusted.
Best YouTube Download Sites Reviewed
Out of several sites we reviewed, the below are the ones we found worthy to me mentioned in the list:
- Offliberty – for its convenience Offliberty provides a simple and straightforward way to download audio/video from YouTube and other sites. There no extra features, just paste the URL, hit the offline button and you have audio ready to be downloaded in few seconds. Another button gives you option to download video. Offliberty does not have any settings – all the downloads are by default of highest quality and resolution. Also, it has a bookmarklet for quick access, minimal ads with no popups and no misleading text.
The site’s positioning is very different from other sites. Quoting from their about page – All this makes Offliberty top our list of recommended site to download videos from YouTube. 2. Peggo – for its experience Peggo is slightly different in the sense that they call themselves as Digital Video Recorder(DVR). But it works in the same manner allowing you too download MP3s and MP4s from SoundCloud and YouTube.
Its high-quality MP3s recording with volume normalization feature drives me to wear my headphones. You can remove extra silence found at the start of the video when downloading the MP3. It has limited ads and easy to use interface which makes it second in our list. The best part of Peggo is that all the metadata of the track is searched and filled automatically with no undesired ID3 tags like Full HD, lyrics etc. 3. Clip Converter – for the options Besides downloading, Clip Converter allows multiple formats to choose for both video and audio. You can select different video resolutions(HD, 1080p, 720p, 480p, 360p) and file types(MP3, M4A, AAC, MP4, 3GP, AVI and MOV) and manually define ID3 tags(artist, title and album). It even lets you change start and end time of the video to be downloaded.
Clip Converter does not have a Chrome extension but you can use a workaround to directly integrate it with YouTube. First, install TamperMonkey – user script manager for Chrome and then install the Clip Converter add-on. Now, Run the script to add the extension to you Chrome. Simply Record, Download, and Convert! 4. SaveDeo – for the sites supported The new kind in the block, SaveDeo supports all the popular social sites and few NSFW sites. It has a sleek interface, no ads and multiple download options.
The only concern is that the SaveDeo is relatively new site with no business model. How will they keep servers running in the long run? Maybe they will start injecting ads once they become popular. 5. KeepVid – for the formats KeepVid supports media download from over 30 websites in a number of formats. Unlike other downloaders where you have to select the format first, Keepvid gives download links for all the available formats (even WEBM).
However, the site doesn’t support converting the videos into different formats. The audio and video are to be downloaded separately and later joined by another KeepVid Video Joiner program. It is also not suitable for mobiles. Lastly, it has multiple misleading ads making it last in our list of best sites to download YouTube videos. Conclusion Except KeepVid, all the other sites work even with mobile browsers. Though they provide same output, the functionality varies a lot between them. I will recommend our readers to use Offliberty for its simple to use interface and trustworthiness. For multiple formats, Clip Converter can be a second choice.
