YouTube downloading using WSL
To be honest, as I'm sure any right-minded individual would agree, downloading videos from YouTube for personal gain is wrong. However, there are occasions when it is arguably reasonable and possibly even legitimate to do such a thing.
It could be that you wish to use a video in a presentation and can’t rely on internet connectivity or just feel "safer" presenting the video offline for fear of an embarrassing spinning buffer wheel of doom!
Over the years, a market opened up for online YouTube downloading services (often accompanied with their complimentary malware and/or questionable adverts).
Many of these "services" have since become unusable.
There is however, a quite wonderful solution – albeit requiring Linux.
No fear, with the WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) on Windows 10, you are just a few steps away from seamless (at the time of writing) YouTube downloading – of course for reasonable and legitimate purposes!
Prerequisites
You will need Windows 10 WSL enabled (this link will walk you through that process).
- Open a command prompt and enter wsl
- Enter sudo apt-get update
- Enter sudo apt-get upgrade
- Enter sudo apt-get install python-pip
- Enter sudo pip install youtube-dl
Aside from the occasional checking for update, you shouldn't need to perform the above prerequisites again.
To download a video
- Enter sudo youtube-dl https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKnxmkOAj88 (change the url as appropriate to the video required)
- The video should download and save to a location accessible from Windows - this can vary, but a good place to start is your "user" folder within Windows.
If you experience issues, you can clear the cache by typing sudo youtube-dl -rm chache-dir
As noted as the top of this post, you should only use this process for reasonable and legitimate purposes.