This is one of the most-searched questions on the web, and most pages answering it skip the part that matters. Here is the honest version.

If the video is yours

This is the easy case, and the answer is better than any converter. Open YouTube Studio → Content, find the video, and use the three-dot menu to Download. You get the original file you uploaded, at the quality you uploaded it — not a capture of YouTube’s compressed delivery stream.

Full instructions, including Google Takeout for a whole channel at once, are in how to download your own YouTube videos.

If the downloaded file is not already MP4, or is in a codec your editor dislikes, run it through our MP4 converter. It converts in your browser and nothing is uploaded.

If the video is not yours

The supported routes are narrower than most pages admit:

  • YouTube’s offline feature. Downloading in the YouTube app, where offered, is downloading with permission. The files stay inside the app rather than becoming ordinary media files — that is the trade.
  • Ask the creator. Underrated. Many creators will simply send you the file, particularly for educational or archival use.
  • Check the licence. Some videos are published under Creative Commons. Note carefully that a CC licence governs what you may do with the work once you hold it — in US law it does not by itself answer the separate question of circumventing a technical measure to obtain it.

Search results for this query are full of sites that take a YouTube URL and return a file. We are not one of them, deliberately.

On 5 February 2026, in Cordova v. Huneault, a US federal court held that YouTube’s rolling cipher is a technological access control under section 1201 of the DMCA — meaning circumventing it can be unlawful independently of copyright, so a fair-use argument does not resolve it. That sits on top of Yout v. RIAA, where a stream-ripping operator failed to obtain a declaration that its tool was lawful.

We cover the US, EU/Irish and UK positions in detail on is it legal to convert YouTube videos?

Beyond the law, those tools are unreliable in a way that matters to you: they break every few weeks when the cipher rotates, and the ad networks that fund them are a well-documented malware vector.

Converting a file you already have

Once the file is on your device, the rest is simple and raises none of the above:

  • Convert to MP4 — H.264 and AAC, the universally compatible combination
  • Extract MP3 audio — strips the video, keeps the sound
  • Compress — when the file is too large to send
  • Trim — cut a section out without re-encoding

All of these run inside your browser. Your file is never uploaded.