I always like to download the best possible version of a video in the WebM format, which plays beautifully at crisp 4K in the free VLC app for iPad.

There’s probably less of a need for downloading YouTube videos on iPhone and iPad now that the YouTube app supports native 4K playback on Apple platforms, but I think it’s great to be able to download videos offline for research and archival purposes regardless. I followed their tutorial and was able to get youtube-dl up and running on my iPad Pro – with support for encoding files via ffmpeg – in literally two minutes. Greg has written an excellent tutorial on how to install the (recently reinstated) youtube-dl utility (which I’ve been using to download YouTube videos on my Mac mini for years) and use it on iPad via a-Shell. Once you've found the app, click Download to begin downloading it to your Mac. The problem is, the iPad doesn’t ship with a Terminal app like the Mac does, so while I could do this on my Mac, I struggled to find a way to use this command on my iPad. Go to WebCatalog and look for the YouTube Desktop App. There is a command-line program you can run called youtube-dl that will download videos from YouTube (and other sites). I discovered that it’s possible to download these videos using the iCab browser if you change the user agent, but I could never get this to work consistently. There are various apps for the Mac that’ll download YouTube videos, but there’s nothing comparable for the iPad. Greg Godwin, writing at NonProfit Workflows:

How to download youtube in macbook pro