Frequently Asked Questions

Downloading media from YouTube occupies a nuanced legal landscape:

• Permitted & Fair Use: Downloading public domain materials, content released under Creative Commons licenses, government educational archives, videos for academic critique, and your own personal uploaded videos is generally protected under fair use principles in many jurisdictions.
• Terms of Service: YouTube's Terms of Service state that users may not access, reproduce, download, or distribute any part of the service unless permitted by law or with prior written permission.
• No DRM Bypassing: Our tool strictly forbids and does not support bypassing Digital Rights Management (DRM), paywalls, or encryption technologies.

Read our complete guide: Is it Legal to Download YouTube Videos? An Educational Overview.

No. Our application intentionally does not support downloading private videos. Private videos require passing YouTube account credentials or sensitive session cookies (cookies.txt). To maintain a zero-trust, secure architecture, our public tool operates without access to user account credentials. Unlisted videos with a shareable URL token work normally.

Common reasons for download failures include:

• HTTP 403 Forbidden: YouTube periodically updates its bot-detection algorithms or signatures. If you see this error, ensure your local yt-dlp version is up to date by running pip install --upgrade yt-dlp.
• Video Geo-Restricted: Some videos are licensed only for specific countries and cannot be streamed from your server's region.
• Video Deleted or Made Private: If the video has been taken down by the uploader, yt-dlp will report that the media is unavailable.
• FFmpeg Missing: For MP3 conversions or 1080p stream muxing, FFmpeg must be installed on the system PATH.

Explore our comprehensive troubleshooting manual: Top yt-dlp Errors & Fixes.

All files are strictly temporary and are kept for a maximum of 24 hours. An automated background worker process inspects file timestamps every hour and permanently removes completed downloads. Be sure to click the green Download File button and save files to your local drive before the window expires.

The default timeout is set to 30 minutes (1,800 seconds). Standard songs, music videos, tutorials, and full-length podcasts (under 2 hours) generally finish downloading in 5 to 45 seconds. Extremely long multi-hour ambient noise videos (e.g. 10 hours) may hit the timeout limit. If you self-host, you can adjust DOWNLOAD_TIMEOUT in your .env file.

No. Your privacy is a core design principle:

• We require no accounts, no logins, and no email addresses.
• We do not sell data to advertising networks or embed third-party tracking pixels.
• The "Save History" feature is strictly opt-in and operates solely within your own browser's local cache (localStorage). You can toggle it off or clear it with one click at any time.

When downloading video (e.g., 1080p or Best), YouTube provides separate video and audio streams. FFmpeg performs direct stream copying (remuxing), which simply packages the streams into an MP4 container without touching the underlying video frames. This takes only 1-2 seconds.

In contrast, converting to MP3 requires full psychoacoustic transcoding. FFmpeg must decompress YouTube's native Opus audio into uncompressed PCM audio and re-encode every second through the LAME MP3 encoder, which requires CPU processing.

YouTube Mixes (playlist IDs starting with RD) are not standard static playlists. They are dynamic algorithmic queues generated on-the-fly by YouTube's recommendation engine. yt-dlp cannot extract them as static playlists (reporting "This playlist type is unviewable").

Rather than throwing a server error, our application automatically recognizes YouTube Mix links and downloads the individual song you are playing. To download a full playlist, use standard static playlists (which begin with PL...).