The 4K Video Downloader is a software solution that allows users to download video and audio files from YouTube, with the help of a simple and efficient interface. It's not freeware, but it's a good tool and it deserves a closer look.
It's not hard to download YouTube videos on the Linux platform and you don't even need a fancy GUI to do it. Linux users can simply employ the terminal and a package called youtube-dl. As the name implies, it can do just that with only a link. The problem is that some users, especially the new ones, might not want to use the terminal to perform such a simple task.
Besides the terminal, there are other methods available as well to download videos from YouTube. For example, there are quite a few Firefox extensions that can do the same thing, although they don't provide some of the more advanced options that you can find in 4K Video Downloader.
It's also worth mentioning that downloading YouTube videos sits in a grey area. Google doesn't allow it and there are no Google Chrome extensions for this task. Even so, there are dozens of applications like this available, most of them on Windows.
Installation
Users can download a .deb file for the application and this seems to be the only binary version available for download. There are also a couple of portable packages, but the source is nowhere to be seen, for obvious reasons.
I tested the app in Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and it worked without any issues. There are a couple of ways to install 4K Video Downloader, either with the Ubuntu Software Center by double-clicking on the package, or with the terminal. If you want to use the terminal you might consider entering this command:
Usage
So, now that you've got the 4K Video Downloader installed, what's the next step? Users just need to enter a link from YouTube into the application and they will receive a simple set of options to choose from, like the quality of the video, the format (by default it's MKV, MP4, FLV, and 3GP), and the path. Hit Download and the file should arrive pretty quickly, depending on your broadband.
This is all fine and dandy, but this simple operation can be done from Firefox, without having to install an application. The best feature of 4K Video Downloader is its ability to download playlists or channels. This option alone makes it a rather interesting application. Yes, it's possible to download playlists with youtube-dl as well, but it takes forever and it's not exactly easy.
The application also features a so-called Smart Mode. Basically, users can set some default options for the download process so they don't have to do it every time they add something to the queue.
4K Video Downloader also has a few other features in the Preferences menu. Users can set how many processor threads the application can use, create subdirectories, skip duplicates (still experimental feature), generate an m3u playlist file, embed subtitles in videos, and search audio tags.
The last feature I want to mention is the ability to download subtitles, but the option only appears if the captions are enabled on the video or if the uploader of the video made them available.