YouTube Video Downloader
YouTube is not built into pvdownloader. Support comes from yt-dlp, the open-source downloader the app offers to fetch with one click, so the first thing worth knowing is that none of this applies until that engine is installed.
Once it is, YouTube is the most thoroughly covered site yt-dlp deals with. Its own extractor list names fifteen entries for it — from plain watch pages through playlists, search results and channel tabs — which is more than any other single site in the list.
This platform is not built in
YouTube works through yt-dlp, a separate open-source downloader. On first run pvdownloader explains this and offers a one-click download from the official source — nothing is bundled with the installer, and if you already have yt-dlp it uses your own copy instead. Without it, the app installs and runs fine; you simply do not get YouTube.
What the engine covers on YouTube
Videos and playlists
A watch page or a youtu.be link is the simple case. Playlists have their own extractor, so a playlist URL is recognised as a playlist rather than mistaken for a single video.
Search and channel tabs
Search URLs, channel tabs and /user/ pages each have a dedicated extractor, so links that are not videos at all still resolve.
Account lists, with cookies
Liked videos, watch history, subscriptions and watch-later all have extractors, but yt-dlp marks them as needing a cookies file because they are behind your account.
No re-encoding
The stream is saved as it is served, with no transcoding pass over it.
How to download from YouTube
- 1
Add the yt-dlp engine
pvdownloader asks on first run and fetches yt-dlp from its official source with one click. Nothing is bundled with the installer, and if you already have yt-dlp installed the app detects and uses your own copy instead.
- 2
Paste the YouTube link
A watch page, a youtu.be link, a playlist or a channel tab all work. The engine identifies which shape it has been given and reports what it found before anything is written to disk.
- 3
Choose a format and download
Pick from the formats the engine reports and start the job. The stream is saved as served rather than re-encoded.
What yt-dlp supports for YouTube
These are the URL shapes yt-dlp's own documentation lists for this site. The status column is upstream's assessment of its own extractors, copied as-is and refreshed on every build — a broken row means yt-dlp says it is broken, not us.
| URL shape | What it covers | Status |
|---|---|---|
clip | — | Supported |
favorites | YouTube liked videos; ":ytfav" keyword (requires cookies) | Supported |
history | Youtube watch history; ":ythis" keyword (requires cookies) | Supported |
music:search_url | YouTube music search URLs with selectable sections, e.g. #songs | Supported |
notif | YouTube notifications; ":ytnotif" keyword (requires cookies) | Supported |
playlist | YouTube playlists | Supported |
recommended | YouTube recommended videos; ":ytrec" keyword | Supported |
search | YouTube search; "ytsearch:" prefix | Supported |
search_url | YouTube search URLs with sorting and filter support | Supported |
shorts:pivot:audio | YouTube Shorts audio pivot (Shorts using audio of a given video) | Supported |
subscriptions | YouTube subscriptions feed; ":ytsubs" keyword (requires cookies) | Supported |
tab | YouTube Tabs | Supported |
user | YouTube user videos; "ytuser:" prefix | Supported |
watchlater | Youtube watch later list; ":ytwatchlater" keyword (requires cookies) | Supported |
What is actually doing the work here
pvdownloader contains no YouTube extractor. When YouTube changes something on its end — which it does constantly — the fix comes from yt-dlp's maintainers rather than from an app update. That matters practically: if downloads stop working one day, updating yt-dlp is the first thing to try, and the optional components can be updated independently of the application for exactly this reason.
The table above is yt-dlp's own list, not ours. It is refreshed from upstream on every build, and the status column is upstream's assessment of its own extractors rather than a claim we are making. Where yt-dlp marks something as currently broken we show it as broken, because quietly dropping the row would tell you less while looking tidier.
Some of those extractors are the account-scoped ones — liked videos, watch history, subscriptions, notifications. Those are not public videos; they are lists tied to your Google account, which is why yt-dlp flags them as needing cookies. That is a property of the data rather than a setting anyone forgot to expose.
YouTube downloader FAQ
Other platforms worth a look
Looking for something else? The full list of supported platforms covers both the built-in providers and everything reachable through yt-dlp.
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