About Viddly

Viddly was launched in 2010 and has been downloaded over 100 million times. We have millions of active users who trust our brand and choose our product for their video downloading and conversion needs.

Our mission is to make it as easy as possible for our users to download YouTube videos in MP3 or MP4 format.

  • CNET, with over 60 million downloads
  • Softonic, with over a million downloads
  • Softlay, where we were rated 4.2/5

Types of YouTube downloaders

A YouTube downloader is a general term for any software which facilitates the downloading of videos from YouTube and possibly other video sharing websites. There are several types;

Viddly and Viddly Plus are desktop-based downloaders. There are several types of downloaders, each with their own advantages and disadvantages;

Desktop software

This type of application requires an install and runs on Windows or Mac. Desktop software generally provides more functionality and power than web applications. For instance, they might allow you to download entire playlists, rather than individual videos one-at-a-time, and converting these to MP3 with a single click of a button. We don’t know of any web-based downloaders which currently allow you to do this.

Browser extensions

Browser extensions a.k.a. add-ons for Google’s Chrome, Mozilla’s Firefox, Opera, or Microsoft’s Edge are generally slightly more convenient than websites since they might add a button right below a YouTube video, but they’re still web-based and as such, they present the same issues: reduced video quality and other limitations, as well as obnoxious or shady (pop-up) advertisements.

Mobile applications

Any mobile application for iOS or Android which allows downloads from YouTube will never be allowed into Google’s Play store. Why? Because its main purpose is a violation of YouTube’s terms of service. Remember who owns YouTube? Yup, Google.

There are a few Android APKs available which you can install only after disabling security mechanisms on your phone. We cannot stress enough that this is a very bad idea. Even trustworthy developers such as Epic have introduced a vulnerability which allowed hackers to install malware on Android devices

You should not trust that any YouTube APK (such as TubeMate, VidMate, and others) that you download outside of the Google Store will not steal your personal information and share your vast collection of dick-picks to your favorite social networks. Don’t do it. It’s not safe. Period.

Websites

A web-based YouTube downloader’s main advantage is that it does not require you to install anything. This might be very useful if you’re on a computer that’s not your own for instance. However, there are also some drawbacks. It generally offers the least ease-of-use since it can’t be integrated with your system, usually won’t allow you to set any preferences, nor do any of them support multiple downloads.

Furthermore, since these websites use server resources, which aren’t free, practically all of them will limit the length and/or quality of the videos that are being downloaded. We do not know of any that allow 1080p content to be downloaded in its original quality for example.

To top it off, most of these websites are also completely overloaded with shady or annoying advertisements. Of course, you could use an ad-blocker such as the well-known AdBlock for Google Chrome, but many of the websites are catching on and disabling their services for users who run ad-blockers.

A very prominent example of an online downloader was KeepVid, which we won’t link to since it was recently shut down, and has been replaced with an informational page, albeit a very bad one with broken English. Another popular online downloading and conversion service is OnlineVideoConverter, but it is barely usable due to the excessive ads and restrictions.