/nIn , "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

I find my browser addon (I use downloadhelper) easier to use than that
commandline would be (especially if I want to change the download target
location) ...

If you look at the man page for the video extractor I use, it has lots of
options which you might not have in the web browswer method, such as
downloading all the videos given a text file playlist, for example.

But to your point, wouldn't a simple Windows file redirect work?
It's a single additional character "" if it does.

Let me try that for you.
Let's take an arbitrary video (short for test purposes).

Click... click... https://youtu.be/pEN_htHtt_c

OK. It didn't work. It just put text-based stderr into the output file.

Or I extract just the audio with this simple command:
C:] youtube-dl.exe -x --audio-format mp3 --audio-quality 0 {URL}

...though I admit a single-stage dowbload-and-audio-extract would be
handy (unless downloadhelper has a switch of which I'm unaware -
anyone?). Is there a GUI for this "youtube-dl.exe" that would save all
that typing (especially with the addition of destination specification)?

Yes. There is a GUI. I don't use the GUI, but there is a GUI.

The confusion is that if you don't know which to use, you spend all your
time figuring it out as there are at least *four* different
youtube-dl-stuff implementations, each with different requirements where
two of the implementations have the exact same name (but they have greatly
different requirements!).

I don't use it, but this is the all-in-one GUI:
https://sourceforge.net/projects/youtube-dl-gtk/

This is the command line one that I use:
https://youtube-dl.org/downloads/latest/youtube-dl.exe

If you don't already have ffmpeg, you'll need it for the one that I use:
http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/

For example, this is the ffmpeg version that I'm using:
http://ffmpeg.zeranoe.com/builds/win...n64-static.zip

The youtube download executables I would *not* use are these:
https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2017.07.15/youtube-dl.exe (requires python)
https://yt-dl.org/downloads/2017.07.15/youtube-dl (also requires python)

If you need more help, I have written a tutorial that you can just cut and
paste and follow as I have written tens of thousands of them because I
write them every time I install anything.