MacTube is finally broken - Who knows a good alternative?

By Jurgen, 17 May, 2015

Forum
macOS and Mac Apps

I love MacTubes but it doesn't work anymore. On the developers web page

http://macapps.sakura.ne.jp/mactubes/index_en.html

he confirmed this and wrote he stopped developing. So is there a good solution for the same tasks:

<ul>
<li>searching for You Tube videos</li>
<li>watching them in the app</li>
<li>downloading the videos</li>
</ul>

I don't need playlists but it was so comfortable to download the videos.

Thanks and
all the best
Jürgen

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Comments

By Piotr Machacz on Friday, June 5, 2015 - 08:29

The way I see this question, there's 2 parts to it. The first is watching videos, and the second is downloading them. For watching, I used to use YouView, but the search feature has been disabled and the developer said it won't be fixed as YouView will eventually be replaced by another app. When? No clue. Personally I just got used to the youtube website and don't really have a problem with it.

As for downloading videos, there is a lot of apps for this, but most of them are very overpriced and may no longer work. I use a command line utility called Youtube-dl because it's the best thing out there. It supports over a hundred other sites, gets updated almost weekly, it can download directly to audio (IE, it just downloads the audio stream, rather than first getting the video and then converting it locally), can save entire channels or playlists, etc etc etc. It's also open source so you don't have to pay for it.

By Jurgen on Friday, June 5, 2015 - 08:29

Thanks for this hint. Sounds definitely like an alternative. Not so convenient but surely doable.

Actually I never had any luck with youtube-dl. it seems to brakes on more and more youtube videos and channels.
And I know how to use the command line. I'm very comfortable with it.