YouTube is great to check out videos on the fly. It’s fast, dynamic and incredibly easy to find other related videos. However, if you have to go offline, that won’t do you much good. Why not download those videos to your computer instead? Not only does this let your enjoy your videos offline, you can also use them in presentations or your own projects.
Downloading a single YouTube video is simple, but it’s a bit harder to download all the videos from a particular YouTube channel in one go. Today we’ll be offering you three ways to tackle this problem.
1. 4K Video Downloader (Cross-platform)
One of the easiest ways to download all the videos from a particular channel on YouTube is by using third-party software like 4K Video Downloader. A big advantage of this particular tool is that it is available for all operating systems: Windows, Mac and Linux. This makes it a great all-round tool that solves our problem. However, depending on your needs, it may come at a price.
4K Video Downloader is free if you use it for individual videos, or for playlists that have under 25 videos total. In other words, if you’re looking at a rather small YouTube channel, take a second to look for a playlist. A lot of channels have automated playlists these days, like ‘most recent uploads’ or ‘most watched videos’. If that playlist has under 25 videos, you can use 4K Video Downloader to download them in a single batch, free of charge.
4K Video Downloader is free if you use it for individual videos, or for playlists that have under 25 videos total. In other words, if you’re looking at a rather small YouTube channel, take a second to look for a playlist. A lot of channels have automated playlists these days, like ‘most recent uploads’ or ‘most watched videos’. If that playlist has under 25 videos, you can use 4K Video Downloader to download them in a single batch, free of charge.
If you purchase a license key ($9.95 at the time of writing), all those limits go right out of the window. You can download a playlist with an gazillion videos, or even download all the videos from a particular channel, even if the channel has no real playlists. It’s this last option that’s especially interesting to us. You can, for example, download all the Technophilia videos from MakeUseOf’s YouTube channel.
In either case, using 4K Video Downloader is deceptively simple. First, you copy the relevant URL to your clipboard. This can be the URL to a single video, a playlist, or simply the URL of a YouTube channel. Press the big Paste Url button in 4K Video Downloader, and wait a minute while the application analyses the content behind the link. When it has finished, just select a filetype and the desired quality for the batch and press Download. Simple as that.2. Free YouTube Download (Windows)
Free YouTube Download is mighty similar to 4K Video Downloader. Although the installation prompts you to install other bloatware (press no to these queries during the installation), it’s ultimately free. Alas, it is only available for Windows computers, so Mac and Linux users will have to sit this one out.
The operation is similar to the previous tool and equally simple. Just copy the URL of a video, playlist or YouTube channel to your clipboard and press Paste inside Free YouTube Download. You’ll have to give the application a minute to parse the files, after which a playlist with those videos is added to the list.
Press the playlist count to customise which videos you want to download and which to skip. This is also where you’ll have to select the video format and quality for your downloads. You can preview how much disk space (and bandwidth) you’ll use with your current settings. If you’re satisfied, Close the playlist panel and press Download in the main application window.
3. BYTubeD and FlashGot (Firefox)
If you don’t mind an additional step or two, you can use Firefox add-ons for a free and cross-platform way to download all the videos from a YouTube channel. Most of the work is done by BYTubeD (or Bulk YouTube Downloader), but FlashGot makes it easier to download a large amount of files.
Use Firefox to go to the relevant page on YouTube. In our case, that’s a user page or channel. After the page has loaded, select BYTubeD from the Tools menu in Firefox. The add-on will browse through all the videos in the channel and find the relevant video files. In the next screen, select the videos you’re interested in (by ticking the Select Allcheckbox, shift-clicking, or using the selection filter), check the video format and quality.
There are two ways you can proceed from here. In the right-most drop-down menu you can choose to Enqueue for Download and start bringing in all those files at once. However, this can be very taxing on your browser, especially if you’re looking at a large amount of files. It’s recommended to instead Generate Links for these files and use FlashGot to regulate the downloads.
After the download links have been generated, select Tools > FlashGot > FlashGot All… to detect the files. Make sure that all files are selected, choose a destination and press OK. FlashGot will start downloading the files three or four at a time.