How to Download YouTube Videos to PC for Free | Tom's Hardware

YouTube is, by far, the most popular user-content video streaming service in the world, hosting everything from children’s songs to live streaming tech shows. But what if you need to download a YouTube video?The officially supported way to download YouTube videos is to pay $11.99 per month for YouTube Premium, which allows you to save clips to your PC or phone for later viewing. However, not only does that cost money, but you don’t end up with a file you can edit or feed to an AI voice-to-text program for transcription. Fortunately, it’s easy to download any YouTube video as an MP4 file, which you can transfer to any device or modify or transcribe as necessary. Note that downloading copyrighted work without permission is illegal and downloading files from YouTube violates its terms of service (opens in new tab) and may lead to termination of your account.Below, we’ll show you two different methods of downloading YouTube videos to your PC. The first method involves using VLC (Video Lan Player), a popular open-source media player and using it to grab the direct URL to an MP4 you can visit and save via your browser. The second method is faster, allowing you to download YouTube
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