UPDATE #4: Use Freetube for regular browsing. This is making the rounds again in The Final Days of Cohost so I figured I'd put this up top. The below method is still very useful if you want to save a high quality copy of something locally with the added bonus that you don't have to go through some scummy external website to do it.
DO NOT download the latest version of MPC-HC
DO NOT download the latest version of yt-dlp then put the executable in the MPC-HC installation folder
DO NOT download the latest ffmpeg essentials and put ffmpeg, ffplay, and ffprobe in the MPC-HC installation folder
After doing the above steps, DO NOT run MPC-HC, go to Open File/URL, then paste in the URL of the video you want to watch
And absolutely DO NOT use Save a Copy if you want to save the video to your PC at original quality instead of using some weird sketchy site or add-on to do it
UPDATE: Okay. This blew up in a way I was not expecting in, uh, 10 hours or so, mostly while I was asleep, and it's a little overwhelming. A lot of people who are more knowledgeable than me have lots to say in the comments about other methods and how to save videos as different formats that I wasn't aware of. Take a look there for other download and format options!
UPDATE 2: Think I'm just gonna silence this post so I don't destroy my notifs for the near future. I'm more an Art Guy™ then a Tech Guy™, and I outlined the process that works for me. I really did not expect this to get so much traction, and there's a lot of discussion in the comments with people helping each other, which is great! Keep doing that! I really do hope everyone finds something that works for them!
UPDATE 3: This is continuing to destroy my notifications anyways because silencing a post doesn't remove the little notification bubble, just prevents it from showing as a notification itself. So if you've read this far, check out my profile, consider sharing or liking one of my art posts that appeals to you if you found this useful.
For our linux friends: the video player mpv will happily load up your system's yt-dlp or youtube-dl and use that if you give it a youtube link. So just install mpv with your package manager, install the latest yt-dlp with pip, and do mpv <youtube url>. That's it! This also works for twitch (though will often break on midroll ads, otherwise you just get a 15 second ad placeholder at the beginning) and many other sites, as long as they don't require a cookie of some sort to load the video player. Keep in mind youtube is constantly updating things, so if this ever stops working just try pip3 install yt-dlp --upgrade and usually someone's already pushed an update to fix it.
Also, by default mpv will use basically the highest quality options, but sometimes that doesn't load fast enough (especially when I just want to skim through a video). There's "the old way" of loading stuff into mpv via youtube-dl that will grab the 720p30 copy, it loads everything in much faster but doesn't have the extra niceties like subtitles and bookmark points for anything timestamped in the description. youtube-dlp -o - <youtube url> | mpv - will load the video this way. One day I'll sit down and figure out how to get mpv to request the 1080p60 copy by default... EDIT: instructions for that thanks to a kind soul in the comments
I've been watching youtube this way exclusively for years now. If you want to use the site even less, you can also grab the "Browse ID" of a channel and turn that into a RSS feed, so you can use RSS feeds instead of subscriptions. You always get an RSS feed "notification" when a new video goes up, no bell icon BS required! I made a really clunky one liner that should reliably spit that out. Replace the secret base youtube URL here with the channel you want to get the ID from.
curl https://www.youtube.com/c/SecretBaseSBN | grep -oE ".{0,10}@id.{0,100}" | perl -pe 's|.*\.com\\\/channel\\\/(.*?)\".*|\1|' | echo "https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=$(</dev/stdin)"
There's also programs like FreeTube if you don't like the hands on approach.
I'm legally required to tell you that there is a program called Freetube that is another way to circumvent most of youtube's bullshit except it's all just one big contained program and there's no linking things to set up or pasting URLs. You just use it like you do the website. It's mentioned at the end of that post there but I keep getting nagged about it (by friends) so I'm making it Obvious. It only got one line because.... there's no setup really.
I don't use it but people have told me good things and if you looked at all this stuff above and went "oh but that's a lot of work :(" then you should look into Freetube.
I'm the kinda weirdo that likes using an RSS feed instead. Your mileage may vary.
Sharing because FreeTube owns. A couple features I like:
SponsorBlock is integrated so you can automatically skip ad reads if you want. I use that feature when I'm following along with a cooking video and I need to know what to do with the eggs now that they're in the pan and I don't have time for a Magic Spoon commercial, Adam.
There's also a feature where it pulls community-chosen titles from Dearrow that more accurately describe the content of some videos. So for example "The secret ingredient chefs are hiding from you!" would be retitled to something like "How to use MSG in your cooking and a brief history of it's use in the US."
Lastly, if you miss when YouTube videos just pulled a random frame from the video for a thumbnail, you can have it do that too! No more will you need to see your favorite YouTuber make one of those three faces. You know, unless their face just looks like that.
) so I'm not super bummed about it).