https://invidious.io/

You can use their list of instances or get served up a fresh one from farside.link

For Linux & Windows desktop,

There’s Freetubeapp,

https://freetubeapp.io/

You can download on FreeTube, but as a heads up, it doesn’t tell you the progress which is frustrating for a longer video. As a tip, if you do a lower quality, it will be faster to help with this issue.

For Android,

There’s NewPipe, which is an F-Droid FOSS front end for Youtube. You can download on here, and minimize videos while they play, which Google itself blocks on the real YT client.

For command line,

There’s both Youtube-DL and Youtube-DLP

One of our readers says the fork, Youtube-DLP is way better:

https://github.com/yt-dlp/yt-dlp

Our reader Vidar uses this with Termux on Android.

&

But here’s the older original for comparison Youtube-DL:

https://ytdl-org.github.io/youtube-dl/

For browser extensions,

There’s Firefox “Video Download Helper”

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/

https://www.downloadhelper.net/

Although I personally can’t vouch for this.

Got more ways? Comment below, I’ll add em to our site