YouTube is the site most people reach for first, and it is not built into pvdownloader. Support comes from yt-dlp, the open-source engine the app offers to fetch with one click. Until that engine is there, a YouTube link will not resolve.

This guide is the walkthrough. The live extractor table — including anything yt-dlp currently marks as broken — is on the YouTube video downloader page, refreshed from upstream on every build of the site.

What you need

pvdownloader itself, plus the yt-dlp engine.

Nothing about YouTube is bundled with the installer. On first run the app explains this and offers a one-click download from yt-dlp’s official source. If you already have yt-dlp on the machine, it detects and uses your copy instead of fetching another.

Two extras sit beside that:

  • yt-dlp — required. This is the thing that actually talks to YouTube. pvdownloader contains no YouTube extractor of its own.
  • FFmpeg — not required to start a download. YouTube often serves the video and the audio as separate streams, and merging those into one file is a conversion step. If the format you pick needs it, the app tells you at that point and offers to fetch FFmpeg. You are not asked to install it up front.

pvdownloader asks before it fetches either one.

Step 1 — Add the yt-dlp engine

If the app has already offered and you accepted, this is done. If you skipped it, add it from the optional-components flow before pasting a YouTube link — otherwise there is nothing to analyse the URL with.

The engine updates independently of the application. That matters later.

Step 2 — Copy the YouTube link

Copy the URL from the address bar. These are the everyday shapes:

  • a watch page
  • a youtu.be short link
  • a playlist
  • a channel tab or /user/ page
  • a search URL

A watch page or a youtu.be link is the simple case: one video. A playlist URL is recognised as a playlist rather than mistaken for a single video, because playlists have their own extractor.

You do not need a YouTube account for any of those. Public videos, playlists, search results and channel tabs are reachable without signing in. pvdownloader never asks for Google credentials.

Step 3 — Paste, pick a format, download

Drop the link into the URL field. The engine identifies which shape it has been given and reports the title and the formats it found before anything is written to disk.

Pick from that list and start the job. The stream is saved as YouTube served it. Nothing is re-encoded to fake a higher quality, and nothing is stamped onto the file.

If the format you chose needs merging, that is the moment FFmpeg may be requested.

When downloads stop working

YouTube changes its internals constantly. When it does, downloads start failing until yt-dlp ships a fix.

The first thing to try is updating yt-dlp, not waiting for a new pvdownloader release. Optional components can be updated on their own for exactly this reason. The application is not in the loop: it has no YouTube extractor to patch.

The status column on the YouTube downloader page is yt-dlp’s own assessment, copied verbatim. Where upstream marks an extractor as currently broken, that page shows it as broken. A row that is fine today can break next month, and the other way around.

Account lists, and the cookies file

A second class of YouTube URL is not public at all: liked videos, watch history, subscriptions, watch later, notifications. Those are lists tied to your Google account. yt-dlp has extractors for them, and it flags every one as needing a cookies file.

That is a property of the data, not a setting anyone forgot to expose. If you want those lists, you supply a cookies.txt yourself. There is no automatic harvesting from Chrome or Firefox. The file is passed only to yt-dlp, only for the request you started, and only to the site you are downloading from.

Most people never need this. A public watch page does not.

pvdownloader is a tool, and it does not decide what you are allowed to do with the result. Downloading a video does not grant you a licence to it.

A few situations where this is worth being careful:

  • Your own uploads — no issue, and this is the single best way to keep a copy of work you have published.
  • Creative Commons material — check the specific licence, because many CC variants still require attribution.
  • Anything else — you need the rights holder’s permission, or a legal exception that applies where you live.

The app does not strip DRM, does not bypass paywalls, and cannot download content that the platform refuses to serve you. If a clip will not play for you in a browser, it will not download here either.