How to download YouTube videos

In this time of ubiquitous internet and abundance of content, downloading videos to your hard drive is rarely necessary. But sometimes, an important video can be hard to find, or can even be permanently removed from a platform, in which case it's not a bad idea to have a personal copy. 

Say you've encountered a cool YouTube video and want to download it for your archive to make sure you still have it in case it disappears. YouTube has no easy "download" button, so how do you  download a video off the platform?

Fortunately, there are a few ways to grab a YouTube video fairly easily, and in good quality. However, before we continue, note that downloading videos from the regular, free version of YouTube is against the site's terms of service. And this brings another problem: Because of this, many of the ways to download YouTube videos that you'll find online are fairly dangerous as they're riddled with spamware and shady ads.  Read more...