YouTube recently changed its website (around January 4, 2026) so that programs that worked in the past for downloading YouTube videos, such as StreamFab, no longer work. My wife and I like to archive YouTube videos we find that have useful information we might wish to refer to again in the future, since we've sometimes found that when we try to view them again on YouTube that a channel where they were posted has disappeared along with all its videos. We have a YouTube premium subscription, which allows one to download videos, but they are stored in a blob file where they are not accessible to programs we use to view videos and there is no guarantee they will remain accessible even in YouTube's limited offline viewing method when a channel disappears. So we were very perturbed that YouTube has now made it very difficult to archive videos. StreamFab has been working very well for my wife and is easy to use, but I needed to look for an alternative for her. A couple of sites that still work that allow one to download YouTube videos are listed below, but downloading through those websites is slower and she found that for fairly large videos the downloads would fail.
https://ytdown.to/en2/
https://v6.www-y2mate.com/
Since I had WinPython, a free and open-source version of the Python programming language installed on a Windows laptop and she is using a Windows 11 system at the moment, though she wants to switch to Linux, I decided to try the yt-dlp Python program that allows one to download YouTube videos from a command-line interface (CLI).
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