2 Free Ways to Download Private YouTube Video [2020 Updated]

Updated Apr 16,2020 | by Cody

You may have seen lots of free online YouTube downloader, but few of them, if any, allow you to download private YouTube video. In this article, I will show you two ways to download any YouTube videos including private or unlisted video without the need to install any software.

Actually, you just need to use a web browser to download videos from YouTube. You don’t have to purchase a dedicated software to do this, nor will you be annoyed by the free tools’ ads. As long as you can watch the private YouTube video, whether it is your own video or others, you can use one of the methods that I am about to show you to download it.

Theoretically, any web browser with a Network developer tools will work, but, as you know, Chrome certainly will not allow you to download videos from YouTube. I bet it is even hard to find a working Chrome extension for downloading videos from YouTube. Here, I highly recommend using Firefox.

You just need to make sure you have the access to watch the private YouTube video. Once the video owner grants you access, you can follow the steps to download it.

Step 1. Just open the private YouTube video watching page. From there, right-click and select Inspect Element.

 Step 2. In the Developers Tools, click on Network and then select Media under the Network tool. Then you’ll see only the HTTP requests made to media files, like audio and video files. If you don’t, reload this page.

Step 3. Click on each link to see the content type. You may see "audio/mp4" or "video/mp4". If you want to download the video, then you want to look for a link with "video/mp4" content type

Step 4. Copy and paste the URL in the address bar, remove the range parameter in the query string and press Enter.

Step 5. When the video or audio loaded, right-click and select "Save As" to download the private YouTube video. 

If try to download the video, the video is without sound. If you want to include the audio, you can use any media editor to combine audio and video together. If you want an easier way to download a video with audio included, then check the next method.

Actually, you can use this method to download any videos from YouTube including copyright-protected videos. You can also use this way to download private Facebook videos.

If you don’t want to go through the steps to put video and audio together, you can get this Video Downloader Professional Firefox Add-on. Google probably have restricted any extension that can download videos from YouTube, so Firefox is recommended.

With this Firefox Add-on, it is very easy to save private YouTube videos. You can just go to the YouTube video page and click on the Video Downloader Professional add-on icon. From there, you will see a few download options with different video quality. You can just click on one of them to download this video.

As you may know, YouTube stores audio and video separately for high-quality videos (1080P or above). Therefore, this Firefox add-on only allows you to download 720P YouTube videos.

If you also want a faster way to download YouTube video, you can use a dedicated software IOTransfer to do that. Also regraded as iPhone file manager software, IOTransfer allows you to download videos to both PC and iPhone. You can refer to the steps below to see how it works.

Step 1. Free download and install IOTransfer on your Windows PC.

Step 2. Copy the URL of the YouTube video that you want to download. You can copy and paste unlisted YouTube video link here to download.

Step 3. Within IOTransfer, click on the Video tab at the top menu. Paste the copied URL in the Downloader’s box.

Step 4. Click Download to download this video. The program will automatically pick the highest available video quality to download. 

If you also want to save YouTube video to iPhone, just check the option Automatically transfer downloaded video to iOS device before clicking Download button. If the video is already downloaded, you can also click one button to transfer it to your iPhone.

By default, it will download YouTube video as MP4. You can always convert YouTube video to another format with IOTransfer if needed.

That’s all the methods that you can use to download private YouTube videos or unlisted videos. You can use the same methods to download any YouTube Music videos to your PC. Hope you find it helpful. If you have had a better experience with saving private videos offline, share it in the comments. 

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