What is your preferred way of downloading youtube videos?
I'm looking to download a number of educational youtube videos for future reference. Looking for a reliable way to download videos. OS is Ubuntu. FF extensions and docker containers all good. I don't really want to install an executable on bare metal unless it is a flatpak.
My goal is for the downloaded videos to be accessed locally via jellyfin. Jellyfin is already sorted.
I use it all the time without any VPN and haven't had any issues. I watch almost all youtube videos in MPV, which uses yt-dlp to get the video. I download any video I may want to watch again later to my server.
I never used a VPN with it. I've been using it for years. I figured I'm getting it directly for YouTube. Google already knows my IP. I figured they wouldn't care unless I abuse it anyway.
Cobalt is an awesome downloader, if the main instance (cobalt.tools) ever goes down or gets blocked by YouTube, there are countless other instances: https://instances.hyper.lol/instances/
It's really a great project, make sure to promote it, give it a star on GitHub, maybe donate a few bucks (crypto addresses can be found when clicking on the donate button in the app)
It is installable as a python module, so it should be easy to sandbox if you need to (though it requires ffmpeg too). Nowadays I almost view it as a standard unix utility though and wouldn't think twice about installing the native package
I self-host MeTube, and have a shortcut set up for my share-screen. When I see a video I want downloaded, I hit the Share button, and press the custom script that sends the link to be downloaded onto my Emby server.