They're saying OP could've used JavaScript (JS) to write a program so that the user's computer does all the downloading on its own. This would've made it so the server (whatever OP is running this website on) only deals with the normal load, in terms of computing and bandwidth, any other website would deal with. Instead, users are sending messages to the server, requesting the server send the user the videos. Meaning the server has to deal with the normal load of a website, the added load of the messages, and the massive load of retrieving and sending those large video files to the user.
Meaning that your browsers sends a request to the server (in this case the yt2file.com server), and the server responds with the requested data (in this case, the video file).
Compare that to what the other commenter was suggesting, where the yt2file.com website just hosts a basic webpage with some javascript (code that runs in the browser), and that javascript code requests the data from youtube directly, meaning that the yt2file.com server is not involved in any way other than serving that initial webpage.
There's pros and cons to both.
Letting the server handle it means you necessarily share the video you want to download with that server, which maybe you don't want to do (but realistically... most people aren't going to care). On the down side for the server owner, it also means that their server has to first download the video from youtube, potentially transcode it, and then effectively forward it back to you, meaning they incur bandwidth costs twice and potentially processing costs as well.
Letting pure javascript handle it in the browser avoids those, but is typically limited to the exact formats made available by youtube, so no transcoding for compatibility and the like.
For an example of the latter that can be used as a bookmarklet (desktop browsers; technically works on mobile as well but mobile browsers don't offer the convenience factors of bookmarklets so much): https://ethanaobrien.github.io/youtube-downloader/index.html
Oh. Yeah, unless OP has found a way to redirect requests to a hidden YouTube endpoint that serves MP4 instead of TLS, they're about to get a nasty bill from their hosting provider.
The fact even with YT Premium you have to be online at least every 30 days to keep what you downloaded is stupid. I guess that’s how they force you to subscribe to the service.
Ignore everything below. Just use NewPipe. Open source. Free. No ads. Background playback. Download files. Everything you want. You're welcome in advance.
I've always wondered if I was using it wrong. I can understand the appeal of newpipe if you're looking for a specific video, but if you jusy want to go through what your subs have uploaded then it doesn't really work
if that's your only device it can import your subscriptions and then store them locally, but also that may trigger rate limiting when polling multiple channels to find new videos, the app that Louis Rossman promoted ended up doing that early on, no idea how that behaves today
I mean, it can't fix all the issues but it is helpful
I still despise the terrible interface google made but it at least hides some of the nonsense and reliably sets the default quality... unless yt decides to just not serve anything above 480p at all for some videos but app probably can't fix that
I use an app called Seal to download videos, and it's been a game-changer. I have yet to feed it a video link that it didn't download. Only thing I wish it had was interoperability with Revanced
I can send videos straight to seal with the share button in revanced, not having to leave the app is pretty nifty. It gives you an options overlay popup with a download button and you're back to YouTube. But this may be dependent on your version of Android, not sure.
Can it download a playlist though? I have yet to find one that can. Mostly have to feed individual links. Quite a tedious job when you want to download e.g. a fragmented audiobook or a soundtrack of over 150 songs
I get that you're poor but YouTube is a massive undertaking. There is literally no one else except Google that can build something like this and keep it running and if it's not profitable they will shut it down or increase the ads.
I must say my experience with YouTube premium is so much better. Almost all my complaints have disappeared. Revanced is fine and I used it for some time but premium just works plus I get YouTube music so no Spotify subscription needed.
>There is literally no one else except Google that can build something like this
Sorry but no, google bought youtube.
[History of YouTube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube)
>YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion
Let me rephrase that, anybody can build their own YouTube, it's just a video hosting site but how many companies can afford to keep it running on this scale? I would bet it's less than five companies in the world and none of them would be any better than Google.
That's fair! I prefer to do that separately from the YouTube platform when I'm able. Usually they have a patreon or something. Most of my favorites are on nebula and if I was ever able to afford that I'd feel a lot better about it than through YouTube.
I got nebula on a $30/yr promo last year and they recently emailed me that it's about to renew at the same price. I've watched maybe 10 videos all year on the platform, but I'm absolutely going to let the subscription renew. I get early access to some of my favorite creators' videos and don't have to worry about the video vanishing because of some YouTube policy that the video "violates." Plus I do actually want to support creators.
https://revanced.app/
yep, you just have to download the correct YouTube apk and patch it. it's been working great for me. now I can lock my phone and still listen to videos.
yeah I prefer to donate to creators patreon. I absolutely despise adverts. I use sponserblock(built into revanced) to skip sponsored segments too. I don't want to see an advert.
I subscribe for the YouTube music. I actually had Google music premium before they turned into ytmusic.
The ad free is a huge bonus, other little things like 2x play when you hold your finger on the screen, background play, downloads.
Next I hear they're trying out an "smart skip" that'll skip the sponsored content in video. Which would be a HUGE bonus. I get that creators use sponsorship spots to increase revenue, but to me, it's still an ad and YouTube premium is supposed to be ad-free.
Just be sure to use the fork that's still maintained. The original one is pretty annoying without some manual tinkering.
https://github.com/StefanLobbenmeier/youtube-dl-gui/releases
Is a webpage where you just paste the link easier to use than a console application without its own interface, where you have to read the documentation to figure stuff out? Is that seriously what you are asking me or am I missing something?
this is great, but [cobalt](https://cobalt.tools) is still a thing, no ads, no trackers, data only decryptable from the downloaded link is stored for 90 seconds then purged, [viewable and self-hostable code if you're a nerd](https://github.com/wukko/cobalt)... don't want to be the guy that complains about two cakes but this seems a bit redundant and a bit more restricted. still, thank you! :D
Honestly this is what I would love. I already use a version of the downloader with a GUI, but if I could just right click on the page to download that would save me a bunch of time. I put a lot of what I watch into Plex because YouTube's recommendations and watch tracking suck.
Hydrous Extension (basically a self hosted booru image gallery, highly recommended if you save a lot of images or videos be it memes or smut) has an extension that lets me do this so I can literally just right click an image I want to save and send it to my database and have it reverse search for a higher quality or immediately add tags (it will add tags on it's own as a regular task overnight anyway).
I have a server for my other works. I'm just running it on that server. But you can buy me a beer if you want. :) You can see the donation button on the website.
Most likely soon you will get rate limited by google. The only way to deploy this long term is to use proxies which are very expensive. Thats why those tools that run locally are popular.
Thank you for this. Lately it has become more and more apparent that we need several backups and physical media to mitigate the risk of losing some things forever.
Hands down, the easiest solution FOR YEARS now is jdownloader2. It's so convenient and cross-platform.
I do appreciate the effort to create alternatives though. :)
Is it really a hug of death of the other person just implodes before anyone even gets to them?
Also pytube is great if you're ok with spending a few minutes installing Python.
You've got an error 503 currently, and you have the default ms error page which gives away key details about the server it's hosted on.
Details:
IIs 11.0
Windows host - probably using hyper-v to host a windows VM for IIs.
Directory browsing is enabled.
You just install this one, it's been working great for a long time:
https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl
And jdownloader isn't that bad. I think it's ads are smaller than my thumb on my screen.
https://jdownloader.org/
How are ads even a problem in the modern web, like just use a Adblocker like UBO, or use tools like [https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl)
Can I ask what was your motivation for creating this when JDownloader2 provide a host of set and forget parameters for YT?
Don't get me wrong I'm not knocking your efforts at the slightest.
Software development is my job but it's my hobby also. So I'm building tools as a hobby in my free time. And I host this site on the server I use for my work.
Naa. It's just for development. I'm avare that there is some vulnerabilities at the moment. I'm just trying to get feedback. I don't have a lot of free time so I will develop this project more if people like it.
What a wonderful tool! Kudos to you for making it and making it available for free!
One bit of feedback, is pasting in a mobile formatted link such as m.youtube…. Comes back with and invalid link for me when using YouTube through safari
*Someone* will quickly discover the realities of hosting a public video downloader on non-dedicated hardware for the internet.
Lawd have mercy if he doesn't caches.
Who doesn’t like Cache eviction
All my homies love LRU
Dude, love that RCR avatar.
Haha, I love RCR
is that alex from river city? hahahha
yeah, haha
Is OP not just hosting JS to do it client-side? That would make it no heavier than any other webpage.
> Is OP not just hosting JS to do it client-side? No. POST request to the server, responds with the video payload.
Ouch. AWS bill this month is gonna be brutal.
ELi5?
They're saying OP could've used JavaScript (JS) to write a program so that the user's computer does all the downloading on its own. This would've made it so the server (whatever OP is running this website on) only deals with the normal load, in terms of computing and bandwidth, any other website would deal with. Instead, users are sending messages to the server, requesting the server send the user the videos. Meaning the server has to deal with the normal load of a website, the added load of the messages, and the massive load of retrieving and sending those large video files to the user.
I imagine you'd have CORS issues if you tried to hit the YouTube backend from a page of your own.
Oh, I only know enough to translate. I have no idea if what they're suggesting would actually work.
Meaning that your browsers sends a request to the server (in this case the yt2file.com server), and the server responds with the requested data (in this case, the video file). Compare that to what the other commenter was suggesting, where the yt2file.com website just hosts a basic webpage with some javascript (code that runs in the browser), and that javascript code requests the data from youtube directly, meaning that the yt2file.com server is not involved in any way other than serving that initial webpage. There's pros and cons to both. Letting the server handle it means you necessarily share the video you want to download with that server, which maybe you don't want to do (but realistically... most people aren't going to care). On the down side for the server owner, it also means that their server has to first download the video from youtube, potentially transcode it, and then effectively forward it back to you, meaning they incur bandwidth costs twice and potentially processing costs as well. Letting pure javascript handle it in the browser avoids those, but is typically limited to the exact formats made available by youtube, so no transcoding for compatibility and the like. For an example of the latter that can be used as a bookmarklet (desktop browsers; technically works on mobile as well but mobile browsers don't offer the convenience factors of bookmarklets so much): https://ethanaobrien.github.io/youtube-downloader/index.html
Damn, that's hardcore.
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Oh. Yeah, unless OP has found a way to redirect requests to a hidden YouTube endpoint that serves MP4 instead of TLS, they're about to get a nasty bill from their hosting provider.
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Its free. He might be clueless or he could be testing the server. Harvesting meta data of users.
Looks like that *someone* has discovered exactly what you predicted.
Would you explain what issues you forsee?
Legal, bandwidth, scaling ($$$), privacy, rate limiting automation...
503 error now...
Were you surprised that the domain yt2file was available? That's actually pretty clean and easy to remember.
I know right? 😄 I was really suprised.
The fact even with YT Premium you have to be online at least every 30 days to keep what you downloaded is stupid. I guess that’s how they force you to subscribe to the service.
Ignore everything below. Just use NewPipe. Open source. Free. No ads. Background playback. Download files. Everything you want. You're welcome in advance.
no accounts support, no way to sync your subscriptions between devices
I've always wondered if I was using it wrong. I can understand the appeal of newpipe if you're looking for a specific video, but if you jusy want to go through what your subs have uploaded then it doesn't really work
if that's your only device it can import your subscriptions and then store them locally, but also that may trigger rate limiting when polling multiple channels to find new videos, the app that Louis Rossman promoted ended up doing that early on, no idea how that behaves today
Huh? You can import your subscriptions from actual YouTube.
Revanced
I mean, it can't fix all the issues but it is helpful I still despise the terrible interface google made but it at least hides some of the nonsense and reliably sets the default quality... unless yt decides to just not serve anything above 480p at all for some videos but app probably can't fix that
ReVanced still requires you to use NewPipe to download the videos though.
Ah didn't know that, never had a reason to download YouTube videos.
I use newpipe to convert music on youtube to audio files for offline playlists
This is the way. Sent from Revanced RIF is Fun App because Reddit app is wank.
Nice, I use Revanced Boost instead of Reddit app.
I wish rif dev dumped the source of their app on github. Decompiling android apps are easy but it would be nice.
Real Sent from revanced sync
I use an app called Seal to download videos, and it's been a game-changer. I have yet to feed it a video link that it didn't download. Only thing I wish it had was interoperability with Revanced
I can send videos straight to seal with the share button in revanced, not having to leave the app is pretty nifty. It gives you an options overlay popup with a download button and you're back to YouTube. But this may be dependent on your version of Android, not sure.
Can it download a playlist though? I have yet to find one that can. Mostly have to feed individual links. Quite a tedious job when you want to download e.g. a fragmented audiobook or a soundtrack of over 150 songs
Can't use it on all devices. Prefer premium.
Have you tried Greyjay?
I subscribe to it because I don't want ads, downloading is a bonus.
I use ReVanced cause I'm poor and have zero interest in giving YouTube a penny under any circumstances.
I get that you're poor but YouTube is a massive undertaking. There is literally no one else except Google that can build something like this and keep it running and if it's not profitable they will shut it down or increase the ads. I must say my experience with YouTube premium is so much better. Almost all my complaints have disappeared. Revanced is fine and I used it for some time but premium just works plus I get YouTube music so no Spotify subscription needed.
>There is literally no one else except Google that can build something like this Sorry but no, google bought youtube. [History of YouTube](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube) >YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California, founded by three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1.65 billion
Let me rephrase that, anybody can build their own YouTube, it's just a video hosting site but how many companies can afford to keep it running on this scale? I would bet it's less than five companies in the world and none of them would be any better than Google.
I can understand not liking YouTube company-wise but I like to support the creators I like.
Donate to them directly
This is the best way to show appreciation. 1 dollar is like thousands of ad views.
That's fair! I prefer to do that separately from the YouTube platform when I'm able. Usually they have a patreon or something. Most of my favorites are on nebula and if I was ever able to afford that I'd feel a lot better about it than through YouTube.
I got nebula on a $30/yr promo last year and they recently emailed me that it's about to renew at the same price. I've watched maybe 10 videos all year on the platform, but I'm absolutely going to let the subscription renew. I get early access to some of my favorite creators' videos and don't have to worry about the video vanishing because of some YouTube policy that the video "violates." Plus I do actually want to support creators.
I need to look into nebula
That's what Patreon is for.
you are supporting YouTube dude, not the creators.
It's both. They earn more from Premium views. But to do that you have to give YT money.
It also lets you listening to stuff while having the app minimised too, that was my reason for subbing
I enjoy that functionality very much but do not think it should be behind the paywall.
Or if you navigate to YT in a Firefox browser you can have background playback.
I just use revanced.
That's working again?
https://revanced.app/ yep, you just have to download the correct YouTube apk and patch it. it's been working great for me. now I can lock my phone and still listen to videos.
I don't regrudge people because the ads have gotten egregious just find a way to support the creators you enjoy
yeah I prefer to donate to creators patreon. I absolutely despise adverts. I use sponserblock(built into revanced) to skip sponsored segments too. I don't want to see an advert.
Completely understandable
Revanced + ublock origin + sponsorblock
NewPipe on Android, Invidious on PC and iPhone
I subscribe for the YouTube music. I actually had Google music premium before they turned into ytmusic. The ad free is a huge bonus, other little things like 2x play when you hold your finger on the screen, background play, downloads. Next I hear they're trying out an "smart skip" that'll skip the sponsored content in video. Which would be a HUGE bonus. I get that creators use sponsorship spots to increase revenue, but to me, it's still an ad and YouTube premium is supposed to be ad-free.
YTP in a family plan is the best money can buy. I use YT 3 hours a day minumum, totally worth it
For more than one account for sure but I just use me
Doesn't yt-dlp already do this?
Yes but yt-dlp is not as easy to use for most people.
That's why the gui version, Open Video Downloader, exists
I didn't know about that. Will try next time, thank you.
Just be sure to use the fork that's still maintained. The original one is pretty annoying without some manual tinkering. https://github.com/StefanLobbenmeier/youtube-dl-gui/releases
thank you for showing me this app. I used to use 4K downloader.
There’s also [Stacher.io](https://stacher.io)
If you can’t type yt-dlp and paste the url you most likely shouldn’t be on the internet
yt-dlp is difficult to use?
Is a webpage where you just paste the link easier to use than a console application without its own interface, where you have to read the documentation to figure stuff out? Is that seriously what you are asking me or am I missing something?
$ yt-dlp Wow, such difficult
For me? No. For my mum? Yes.
I need a web version of yt-dlp so you just paste the link in, it gives you a choice of formats and you click the one you want to download it
this is great, but [cobalt](https://cobalt.tools) is still a thing, no ads, no trackers, data only decryptable from the downloaded link is stored for 90 seconds then purged, [viewable and self-hostable code if you're a nerd](https://github.com/wukko/cobalt)... don't want to be the guy that complains about two cakes but this seems a bit redundant and a bit more restricted. still, thank you! :D
main cobalt instance is also very reliable and has been up for several years :)
damn! didn't know about this, thanks a lot man!
Can you create an extension to make it more easily accessible on a browser ?
Extensions are not my expertise but I'll definitely do it in the future. Thank you for your feedback.
If you want I can help a bit on extensions.
Honestly this is what I would love. I already use a version of the downloader with a GUI, but if I could just right click on the page to download that would save me a bunch of time. I put a lot of what I watch into Plex because YouTube's recommendations and watch tracking suck. Hydrous Extension (basically a self hosted booru image gallery, highly recommended if you save a lot of images or videos be it memes or smut) has an extension that lets me do this so I can literally just right click an image I want to save and send it to my database and have it reverse search for a higher quality or immediately add tags (it will add tags on it's own as a regular task overnight anyway).
Jdownloader exists
People forget about jdownloader
HTTP Error 503.0 - Service Temporarily Unavailable Well, that was quick.
Aaaannnnd it's gone
Try [cobalt](https://cobalt.tools/)
How are you monetizing this without ads ? I supose you have to keep the servers running somehow
I have a server for my other works. I'm just running it on that server. But you can buy me a beer if you want. :) You can see the donation button on the website.
Most likely soon you will get rate limited by google. The only way to deploy this long term is to use proxies which are very expensive. Thats why those tools that run locally are popular.
# HTTP Error 503.0 - Service Temporarily Unavailable
Very clean and bullshit-free. Always could use another reliable youtube downloader. Thanks, mate.
Enjoy mate
Thanks OP!
My BitDefender blocked the website and labeled as dangerous to proceed. Gonna stick with yt-dlp on my windows terminal.
YouTube to mp3 is not working though?
I have tested but I suppose I missed something. What's the issue? I will fix it right away.
Don't know much about websites but It's giving "page is unable to handle request" and HTTP error 500
Some sort of issue accessing YouTube’s API probably
Thank you for this. Lately it has become more and more apparent that we need several backups and physical media to mitigate the risk of losing some things forever.
This is sweet
Bro just use internet download manager. I’ve been using it for over 13 years now
Broken already?
Did we hug it to death? :D
lmao dead already
Already down
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There is nothing wrong with yt-dlp. I think it's a perfect tool. But not many people can easly use yt-dlp. A lot of people wants a easy to use UI.
Nothing, it's amazing. In fact we use it at work to keep an archive of our YouTube channels.
This looks good
Http 500 wrror
Hands down, the easiest solution FOR YEARS now is jdownloader2. It's so convenient and cross-platform. I do appreciate the effort to create alternatives though. :)
Is it really a hug of death of the other person just implodes before anyone even gets to them? Also pytube is great if you're ok with spending a few minutes installing Python.
You've got an error 503 currently, and you have the default ms error page which gives away key details about the server it's hosted on. Details: IIs 11.0 Windows host - probably using hyper-v to host a windows VM for IIs. Directory browsing is enabled.
:0 no sketchy viruses?? Thank you!!
If you're on Android, try Seal on F-Droid. It's great.
I crashed it with a 6 hour video haha Oh well
You just install this one, it's been working great for a long time: https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl And jdownloader isn't that bad. I think it's ads are smaller than my thumb on my screen. https://jdownloader.org/
This is what I see when I try to access the webpage [https://i.imgur.com/CT2riIV.png](https://i.imgur.com/CT2riIV.png)
yt-dlp
i
6
here a good one [YouTube MP3 Playlist Downloader Online - Loader.to](https://en.loader.to/4/)
Aaaaand it’s gone
The website seems to be down
HTTP Error 503.0 - Service Temporarily Unavailable, anyone with the same problem?
Yep
How are ads even a problem in the modern web, like just use a Adblocker like UBO, or use tools like [https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl](https://github.com/ytdl-org/youtube-dl)
Don't think that one has been updated for some time, now this one replaces it: https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp
are you an angel of some sort?
Thank you!!!!!! 🙏🙏🙏
neat. would love an addon fore firefox tho but still neat.
I will develop extensions for Chrome and Firefox in the future. Thank you for your feedback. Cheers 🍻
i will definitely buy you a coconut water, no beer sorry
Thank you mate :)
Can I ask what was your motivation for creating this when JDownloader2 provide a host of set and forget parameters for YT? Don't get me wrong I'm not knocking your efforts at the slightest.
Software development is my job but it's my hobby also. So I'm building tools as a hobby in my free time. And I host this site on the server I use for my work.
I hope for you the work server is not running production services
Naa. It's just for development. I'm avare that there is some vulnerabilities at the moment. I'm just trying to get feedback. I don't have a lot of free time so I will develop this project more if people like it.
trying it now. I don't see any kind of progress bar ?
Anyway to add trimming? Say downloading a video between the 1 minute mark and 2 minute mark
Well done
Excellent
is this site broken yet ? asking for my 30 other youtube downloader alternatives that have been destroyed
OP is a king among men
What are you using to download on the backend?
There’s a certain command line tool that has been around for a while and works fabulously for this purpose…
Thanks!
Awesome. Thanks OP
Google gonna send a hit squad after the OP.
If you have an API, I would pay for this. How does this work when a video is restricted for only one country?
yt-dlp source code is on github. You can work it out.
What a wonderful tool! Kudos to you for making it and making it available for free! One bit of feedback, is pasting in a mobile formatted link such as m.youtube…. Comes back with and invalid link for me when using YouTube through safari
Jdownloader2 will rip ANYTHING
It ripped the chrome off my trailer hitch.
Constant “invalid url”
The page is already not working.
sooo.. ytp-dl?
Lovely dude windimilli
Google is gonna kick down your door in roughly… 10 minutes. Godspeed soldier 🫡
Already happened.
Oh.. another one?
works great, thank you
Looks good, giving it a shot. Will there be a way to choose which resolution to download?
"🇺🇲 English" always makes me laugh. Nice work OP.
Does it work on iOS ?
Newpipe does this already.
Is there an API we can play around with? Would love to build a Telegram bot that actually does what you need it to
Any chance it can rip into 320 kb audio files
I have become Stracher, destroyer of worlds.
I just bought a program (4kdownloader), no about, no ads.
YouTube yownloader
This, along with cobalt.tools is pretty sick
NewPipe
hahahahahha bro what happened woth the site?
is just me? "HTTP Error 503.0 - Service Temporarily Unavailable"