Download YouTube member videos
There’s a lot of websites that allow you to download YouTube videos but they fail when it comes to member videos. Below guide will allow you to download Member videos that you have access to on your YouTube account.
Installation
We’ll need to download yt-dlp and preferably FFmpeg so we have more options when it comes to conversion of downloaded videos to different formats and resolutions.
yt-dlp
Install yt-dlp https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Installation in a empty folder
FFmpeg
Download FFmpeg https://ffmpeg.org/download.html (for better format conversion)
Extract the FFmpeg files and add ffmpeg.exe to your system PATH (or place it in the same folder as yt-dlp.exe).
You’re now able to download public non-member videos and don’t need to do anything more if you’re not interested in member content. Open a terminal in the same folder where you installed yt-dlp and try below command, remeber to replace “[URL]” with an actual Youtube link. It will save videos by default in the same folder as the yt-dlp.exe file are located.
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yt-dlp [URL]
Cookies
For yt-dlp to be able to access member videos it needs access to your browser cookies. The easiest way is to use --cookies-from-browser [Browser].
This isn’t working with Chrome and may be because of https://security.googleblog.com/2024/07/improving-security-of-chrome-cookies-on.html which once rolled out and will likely mean –cookies-from-browser chrome will be permanently broken on Windows. Read more about this issue here: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/issues/10927
So we’ll use Firefox. Make sure you have it installed and have signed into your YouTube account.
Commands
Download all members from a channel (You must be a member of their chanel)
Go to a YouTube chanel, click on the Videos tab and copy the URL. Replace https://www.youtube.com/c/Chanelname/videos with the URL and use “” around it
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yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --match-filter "availability=members" -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 "https://www.youtube.com/c/Chanelname/videos"
Download all non-members from a channel
To download all non-member videos change filter to "availability=public”
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yt-dlp --cookies-from-browser firefox --match-filter "availability=public" -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 "https://www.youtube.com/c/Chanelname/videos"
Download a specific video
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yt-dlp -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 --cookies-from-browser firefox "VIDEO_URL"
More information about yt-dlp commands https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp?tab=readme-ov-file#general-options
Update yt-dlp
If running into any issues, try updating yt-dlp.
You can use yt-dlp -U command to update if you are using the release binaries
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yt-dlp -U
If you installed with pip, simply re-run the same command that was used to install the program