Youtube has tons of vlogs and other garbage but it also has full movies, especially hard to find movies that may not be available anywhere else.

The legalities of downloading content you don’t own are nebulous, but lots of people do it, and it’s generally regarded as permissible or at least unenforcible. Uploading or distributing content you don’t own is usually illegal and can result in take down notices, warning letters, or lawsuits.

In this tutorial I’ll discuss how to download and for the scope of this document I’ll state that that this tutorial is intended to use for downloading your own content, the content you created and uploaded in the first place.

Remember, recording a movie or show from a broadcast online or streaming is perfectly legal. So if you want to remain well within the bounds of the law, you can use a cloud dvr like playon.

Playon has two products, home and cloud. Both allows you to record streams from most major streaming platforms, including youtube, netflix, hulu, max, peacock and more. How it works is you securely log into your account on your pc (home) or a remote server (cloud). Playon’s software streams the content you want to record and records it. You then download it and watch at your leisure. This is no different in concept than plugging a vcr into your tv and recording or using an old tivo or other dvr you get from a cable company, except your files are portable.

However if you just want to download directly you can use jdownloader or airy. I first learned about these apps when I learned that the RIAA tried to send Google a takedown notice about this wikipedia entry.

The RIAA wanted google to stop returning this result when users searched for youtube downloders.

Jdownloader is easy to use, just install it from a trusted source, paste your youtube link, and tell it to start all downloads.

It will download the video, subtitles, thumbnails and more. It’s not perfect, sometimes it downloads the wrong language if the file contains multiple audio tracks… or so I’ve heard, I wouldn’t know personally, because I have never used it to download great classic movies I can’t even find copies of on DVD or Blu-ray.

Youtube respects takedown notices, and they try to prevent copyrighted material from appearing on their website. However, often, full movies do appear on the site, and this is especially true of old movies from the 1920s, 30s, 40s, and 50s. i would assume these movies are likely in the public domain or the copyright holder is unknown, or has abandoned their rights, but I’m not a lawyer, I’m just a guy who read a wikipedia entry and never ever tried it out.

Theoretically if someone wanted to, they could find a playlist of all kinds of movies by searching for “full movie playlist” and download them all in a few minutes…but not you, you’re a good boy (or girl) and would never infringe on the rights of the RIAA and MPAA.

Hey different topic but did you know it’s perfectly legal to make copies of physical media you purchased but it’s against the law to break the encryption the disk is protected with? I’m just pointing out that the MPAA and RIAA don’t respect your right to make your copy either. (Nobody has ever been prosecuted for ripping a dvd either).

Anyway those were the tools you can use to legally download your own personal content that you own and uploaded to youtube – have fun and be safe.

If you need a good VPN, the only one I know of that will allow you to sign up without an email address is Mullvad. You can pay in bitcoin or better yet buy a gift card on Amazon. Mullvad will know you paid with a gift card but won’t know which provider sold it to you and since you bought it from a 3rd party seller on amazon, Mullvad won’t have a record of your payment. Personally I would buy bitcoin online through robinhood, cashapp, or coinbase, and send payment to a private wallet like Exodus, then I would send bitcoin to Mullvad.

Mullvad keeps you safe online when you’re sailing the high seas, downloading idk open source linux isos 🤣.