I would like a simple way to download videos from the internet. For example, from YouTube, but also from social networks or, ideally, streams. Specific add-ons for YouTube exist, but I’m looking for something more general.
There are probably hundreds of Firefox plugins that promise to do this. However, many of them don’t seem to be very good. Which plugin do you use for this?
Does it have to be a Firefox extension? If not, I would use yt-dlp. It’s open source and easy to use.
If you use Android, I recommend Seal. It uses
yt-dlpinternally, nicely packaged into an Android app.Unfortunately Seal has not had a release in over a year, since October 2024. It may still work but due to a recent (November 2025) change in yt-dlp an external JavaScript runtime is now required for full YouTube support.
There is YTDLnis as an alternative. It’s on F-Droid but for some reason the page for it 404’s (it’s clearly there in my client though).
Ah, good to know.
I haven’t downloaded anything from YouTube recently, but will switch to YTDLnis.
Thanks!
This is what I use. I use OpenWith extension to invoke yt-dlp from Firefox. This extension was abandoned in 2021 but it still works.
Video DownloadHelper sounds like it would meet your needs. It’s even recommended by Firefox.
I’ve used this for 10+ years. It’s incredibly versatile, stable, and effective. I used it this week to download some TV episodes from a (bootleg) streaming site. It’s a great extension.
Sorry to bother you with this, but do you know of a simple tutorial on how to get from a GitHub link to something I can work with? I’m still pretty new to Linux and have no idea about Git, compiling, dependencies, and all that stuff.
This was linked to in the github readme:
https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp/wiki/Installation
Personally, I use pip to install yt-dlp beta versions because YouTube changes so fast.
pip install -U --pre yt-dlp[default]
Xtreme download manager + it’s browser extension.
Cat Catch is the only one ive found to work properly. It looks a bit sketchy and isn’t very intuitive but it does work.
