YouTube is an exceptionally popular video hosting website that doesn’t need introduction. It is estimated that one-third of Earth’s population uses YouTube at least in some capacity. And why wouldn’t they? YouTube has everything. It hosts all kinds of channels: channels dedicated to music videos, to educational videos, to let’s plays, to children’s entertainment, and more. All this wealth of content is tied to YouTube, and cannot be downloaded from the website directly. After all, YouTube makes money from advertisements. But there are many third-party tools that can download videos from YouTube. Some of these tools are advanced enough to feature bulk download options. This is what we will focus on today: tools that will allow you to download a YouTube channel on Mac.
Use SnapDownloader (best overall)
SnapDownloader is one of the best YouTube downloader programs currently available. It can download entire channels or playlists at once, as well as individual videos. You can also schedule videos to be downloaded later; so if you want to download many videos, you can do it overnight, without impacting your internet speed. It is also capable of bypassing YouTube’s geographic restrictions, so you can download videos not available in your country.
SnapDownloader is a paid application, but it features a free trial. The free version doesn’t have any feature restrictions, but will stop working after 48 hours. This is more than enough time to download several YouTube channels, especially if you prepare beforehand. And if you plan to do it regularly, purchasing a full version may be a worthwhile investment.
Use YouTube Multi Downloader (easy but time-consuming)
This is the simplest, but also the most time-consuming method available. The idea is that you simply download one video after another using one of many YouTube downloader tools. Although this is hardly a fun way to spend your time, this method does not require you to spend money or learn anything new.
The best tool to use for this purpose is YouTube Multi Downloader. It will provide you with download links for each video in a channel or a playlist, though you will still have to save each one individually.
Use Youtube-DL (powerful but hard to use)
Youtube-DL is a very powerful program. It has many features and it’s completely free, too. But there is, unfortunately, a catch. The program doesn’t have a graphical user interface, so it can only be used by typing in commands.
That said, Youtube-DL really does have a lot of features: it can automatically download playlists, or parts of playlists, or entire channels, just like SnapDownloader, but it can also exclude certain videos while doing so. You can choose to only download videos that have a certain amount of views or comments, videos that were uploaded within a certain time range, videos that have a certain word in their names. It can download subtitles, video descriptions, automatically attempt to bypass geographic restrictions on videos, and more.
So if you need to download vidoes from YouTube in bulk, and do so intelligently, Youtube-DL might be worth learning. Although it is a difficult program to use, the automation abilities it provides are unparalleled. Youtube-DL’s page on GitHub is a good place to start if you’re already familiar with using the command line. Otherwise, you can use a guide, such as this one, that will walk you through the entire process.