How to download a video on your Mac

A Mac has no built-in way to save a video from YouTube or most other sites. Koi has one in the notch: copy the video's link, hover the notch, open Tools, click Downloader, paste the link and press Return. Pick the video, the video without sound or just the sound, then a size, and it's saved to your Downloads.

We make Koi, so read the Koi part with that in mind. Everything about Koi here is what version 2.1 does. Only download what you have the right to: your own videos, ones the creator lets you keep, or ones whose license allows it. Many sites' terms forbid downloading, and that's on whoever downloads.

1. Copy the video's link from your browser's address bar, or from the site's Share button.
2. Hover the notch at the top of your screen, open Tools and click Downloader.
3. Paste the link in the field and press Return. Koi reads the link and shows the video's picture, title and site.
4. Pick Video, No sound or Sound only.
5. Pick a size: 4K, 1440p, 1080p and down, each with about how big the file will be. For Sound only, click Download M4A.
6. Koi downloads it to your Downloads folder, named after the video, and puts it in the Files Tray. Click Open, Show in Finder, or Another for the next one.

• It keeps going with the notch folded, so you can get on with something else. Cancel stops it.
• It works on YouTube, TikTok, X, Instagram, Vimeo and hundreds more sites.
• Your Mac fetches the video straight from the site. It never goes through Koi's server.

• Drag the link, from the address bar or a page, onto the notch. The notch shows Download video; drop it there and Koi reads it.
• Ask Koi on a call: “download this video”, “just the sound” or “in 720”. Koi takes the size you asked for, or the nearest one under it, or the best there is. It needs Let Koi use my Mac for me turned on, like anything else Koi does on your Mac.
• Open koi://download?url= followed by the link, from Shortcuts or a script.

• Video is the picture and the sound together, as an MP4.
• No sound keeps the picture alone. Handy for a clip you'll put music under.
• Sound only is an M4A: a talk, a podcast posted as a video, a song you have the right to keep.

Want the words rather than the sound? Download the sound, then drop it on Koi's Transcribe, which writes down what was said on your Mac, with timestamps.

At each size Koi picks H.264 video and AAC sound first, because they play everywhere on a Mac. Some sizes only come in newer formats: on YouTube, 4K is VP9 or AV1. Koi still saves those as MP4, but QuickTime Player only plays the AV1 kind, and only on newer Macs. If a 4K download won't play, pick 1080p, or open it in a player like VLC.

• Private videos, ones you have to sign in to see, paid streams and anything with DRM. The site refuses, and Koi tells you so.
• Playlists. One link is one video.
• Live streams while they're live. Wait until the stream ends.

When a site changes how it serves video, a download from it can stop working until Koi's next update, as the tools that do the fetching come inside the app.

yt-dlp is the free, open source command line tool that does the fetching inside Koi. On its own you run it in Terminal, and it needs ffmpeg to join a picture and a sound that come separately. Mac apps like Downie and Pulltube put a window on the same job, with browser extensions; see our Downie alternatives.

• “What you copied isn't a link”: copy the video's address itself, not its title.
• A link to a playlist or a channel isn't one video. Open the video and copy its own link.
• A 4K file is big. The size buttons show about how big before you pick.
• A video that won't play in QuickTime is probably VP9. Pick 1080p next time.

Related: extract the audio from a video, compress a video or trim a video. More on Koi's video downloader.

yt-dlp is free. Koi has no free plan: Pro is $15 a month, or $1 for your first 3 days. Lifetime is paid once. The video downloader comes with it, along with dictation, call recording and an assistant in your notch. See the plans.