There are several solutions on the Mac, and I review a few of them here. Whatever the reason, you don’t have to rely on Firefox to download videos from YouTube. Or, you may want to be able to play some YouTube videos in a situation where there’s no Internet access. A friend of mine accidentally deleted the “sizzle clip” he slaps on the front of every video in iMovie, and he solved the problem by downloading one of his own videos from YouTube and extracting that clip. For example, they may want to download short clips to use in their videos (honoring the doctrine of fair use, of course). The uploader might pull a video down, YouTube may remove a video in response to a copyright complaint (sometimes legitimate, sometimes not), and a video might disappear if it runs afoul of YouTube’s ever-changing and seemingly haphazard standards for acceptable content.īut preservation isn’t the only reason people download YouTube videos. Like most cloud-based things, YouTube videos are ephemeral-they vanish all the time for all kinds of reasons. There are several reasons you might want to download videos from YouTube. Recent changes in Firefox have broken extensions like DownThemAll, which used to be a handy way to download videos. When I reviewed the video player IINA (see “ Prepare for Apple Dropping Old Media Formats with the IINA Video Player,” ), quite a few TidBITS readers took it as an opportunity to vent their frustrations about downloading videos from YouTube. #1644: Explaining Mastodon and the Fediverse, HomePod Software 16.3 and tvOS 16.3, GoTo breach.#1645: AirPlay iPhone to Mac for remote video, Siri learns to restart iPhones, Apple's Q1 2023 financials.1646: Security-focused OS updates, Photos Workbench review, Mastodon client wishlist, Apple-related conferences.1647: Focus-caused notification issues, site-specific browser examples, virtualizing Windows on M-series Macs.#1648: iPhone passcode thefts, Center Cam improves webcam eye contact, APFS Uncertainty Principle.