I just want to chime in here and share my workflow for YouTube downloads.
In a terminal, I would suggest that you install the following packages with the command below:
- youtube-dl
- ffmpeg
- atomicparsley
- tor
sudo apt install youtube-dl ffmpeg atomicparsley tor
I think that ffmpeg is installed by default in Debian and PureOS, but it is safe to include it in the manual install command above just to make sure that it is installed. The youtube-dl command is the main package to download video and audio content from YouTube and many other sites across the web, and ffmpeg is needed by youtube-dl in order to automatically stitch together audio and HD video that is 1080 or greater. The atomicparsley package is useful if you would like to use some of the options for youtube-dl to attach the video thumnail or meta-data into the final video download.
The tor package for terminal can be necessary in order to download videos when YouTube or whatever other video hosting site blocks your IP address. To do this, you just need to add “torsocks -i” before the youtube-dl command, as shown below:
youtube-dl [options] [video url that you want to download]
torsocks -i youtube-dl [options] [video url that you want to download]
You can always run the following command to check out all the options for youtube-dl:
youtube-dl -h
or
youtube-dl --help