You have probably discovered that downloading videos from certain websites is hard. If you try to download a video from youtube, you have to use one of the ad-infested free YouTube video downloaders. Other sites like Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr are even harder to find downloaders for. Luckily, there is a free and open-source program that will end your struggles and help you download and video from any site for free. We are going to use the program called youtube-dl
1. Download youtube-dl
Go to the homepage, and download YouTube-dl. Go to the download button, and select the windows exe hyperlink (assuming you are on Windows). YouTube-dl requires that you have Python installed. If you don’t have Python installed, you can go to this link to download and install the latest version.
2. Downloading any video online
To download any video online, first, open up youtube-dl. YouTube-dl is a command-line only program with no user interface. To open it, you can launch command prompt from the start menu and drag and drop the youtube-dl executable on the window. Or, you can open up Command Prompt in the existing folder youtube-dl is downloaded at by holding down shift, right-click and select the option to open command window here.
Once you have youtube-dl started, all you need to do is paste in a video link, and it will download the video to the current directory that CommandPrompt is pointing to. For example, I can download any youtube video by simpling pasting the URL.
I can also use it to download any Instagram video.
That’s it! You can use youtube-dl to easily download any video online from any site for free.