How to Download a Whole YouTube Playlist or Channel

The short version: use a tool that expands the playlist into individual videos before it starts downloading. Everything else follows from that one capability.

Why expansion matters more than it sounds

Plenty of tools accept a playlist URL and immediately begin downloading all of it. That is fine for a twelve-video playlist and miserable for a four-hundred-video channel, because you get no say in what arrives, no way to skip the eight you already have, and one failure part-way through can take the whole run down.

Expanding first means the tool fetches the playlist's index — titles, durations, thumbnails — without downloading any media. You then choose. This is quick, because the index is tiny compared to the videos.

Step by step

1. Copy the playlist or channel URL

Any of these work: a playlist URL containing list=, a channel URL, or a channel's Videos tab. For a channel, you generally want the Videos tab rather than the front page, since the front page is a curated layout rather than a complete list.

2. Paste it and let it expand

In Boo, paste the URL and the playlist picker opens with every video listed. Large channels take a few seconds — it is fetching an index, not media.

3. Pick what you actually want

This is the step that saves the evening. Tick individual videos, or take the lot. For a channel backup you probably want everything; for a course you might want only the sections you have not watched.

4. Choose a quality before you commit

Worth thinking about for a moment, because the multiplier is brutal across hundreds of files:

• 1080p — the sensible default. Looks fine on a laptop, roughly 1GB per hour.
• 4K — only if you will watch on a large screen, and only if the source is genuinely 4K. Three to four times the size.
• 720p — perfectly reasonable for lectures and talking-head content, and much smaller.
• Audio only — for podcasts, interviews and mixes, a fraction of the size.

5. Let the queue run

Boo runs up to five at a time, each with its own progress bar and ETA. The important part is that each item is independent: if number 57 fails because the video is private, the other 399 carry on and you retry that one on its own.

Things that go wrong, and what they mean

• Some videos are skipped. Usually private, deleted or region-locked. Nothing to be done — they are not reachable.
• Age-restricted videos fail. These need a signed-in session. Enable browser cookies in Settings and close the browser first — Chromium-family browsers lock their cookie database while running.
• Everything fails at once. Almost always the extraction engine being out of date after a site change. Settings, then Download engine, then Check for updates.
• It is slower than expected. Running five at once splits your connection five ways. For a very large backlog that is still the fastest route overall.

A note on channel backups

If you are archiving your own channel, take the maximum quality available. An archive is worth doing once, properly — you will not want to repeat it, and the platform's copy is not a backup if the platform is the thing that fails.

If you are downloading someone else's channel, have a look at the legality question first.