How To Download All Videos From A YouTube Playlist

A bit after I figured out that there is a wealth of programming tutorials on YouTube, I thought it might be a good idea to download them all so I can view them on the go on my mobile devices. Since the majority of these videos have been kindly organized into neat playlists, the question now seemed to be whether there is a way to download whole playlists. I certainly wasn’t the only one to ask this question. In fact, our readers have also wondered the same thing on the Answers community.

Today, we’ll go over two ways you can download entire playlists, one which should make Firefox users ecstatic, and another Windows program which presents some handy options for mass video downloaders.

BYTubeD – Bulk Youtube Video Downloader (Firefox Addon)

This Firefox 4-compatible add-on is a simple but fantastic little tool to help you find download links for multiple videos. Once you’re in a playlist page, you can right-click and select the BYTubeD option. The button can also be invoked from any YouTube pages with multiple videos, such as search results from a keyword.

After you click on the BYTubeD link, a window will appear with the list of video links it has found. Now this is the part that confused me at first, because I didn’t quite read the instructions or the Help section. You have to select the videos you want to download by pressing Ctrl + A to select all videos or hold Ctrl while you click on the specific links you want.
Once you have a few neon green links, you can select the destination folder, whether you want the videos in FLV format or (MP4 if they’re available), and whether to generate links or enqueue videos for download.
If you chose Enqueue for Download and pressed Start, the default Firefox download manager will popup and show the current downloads.

Since I have DownThemAll, I chose Generate Links, so BYTubeD will create a new HTML file with links to the videos I selected so I can use DownThemAll on the current page. Generate Links should work for other download managers as well.

I have found BYTubeD to work flawlessly. If you don’t use Firefox, you can still download multiple videos from a playlist with the following program.

DVDVideoSoft’s Free Youtube Download [Windows]

DVDVideoSoft has a variety of converter software, but the one we are interested in is the YouTube Download 3.0.1. When you’re installing the latest build, make sure to carefully choose what to install, because for older versions of other program files by DVDVideoSoft, there could be crapware offers sometimes.

Once you have installed the YouTube Download program, you can paste in any video or playlist URL and choose the video quality and video format, such as MP3, FLV and 3GP.

For AVI, you have to click on Edit, which will bring up the preset editor.

One of the best parts about this downloader program is that you can preview the size of the individual videos and the playlist as a whole depending on the video format you choose. You can also select individual videos from a playlist that you want to download and which ones you want to skip.

The instructions for this program suggest that you can also use this program to download all of the videos from a channel as well.

For Linux users, youtube-dl is incredibly powerful and also supports playlist downloading. See this video for the how-to. Does anyone know if there’s a good YouTube playlist downloader for Mac?

Now, let’s hear from you. What do you use to download YouTube playlists? Enlighten us in the comments!