In message , Bill
writes
J. P. Gilliver (John) wrote:

All of my favourite (and not-so favourite) Youtube downloaders no
longer work on this XP machine.

Has anyone else got the same problem - or is it just me? Do I have to
resort to a newly-acquired elderly machine running W10? 4K Video
Downloader certainly does work on W10 - but later versions won't
install on XP, and older versions install but don't work).

The ancient version of DownloadHelper that I use with my Firefox 27
still worked several times today! (FF27 itself won't play the YouTube
pages, but load them into it, and DLH still works. OK, sometimes I have
to click "Next up" then the back button.) I'm on W7 (32 bit), but I'm
pretty sure those two are the same as I was using under XP.

I also endorse the recommendation of youtube-dl (with the "-" in its
name). OK, it's a command-line utility, with lots of fancy parameters,
but you can (and I usually do) use it without any (other than the URL of
the page containing the video, obviously). [And despite its name, it
works on almost any page with a video on it, not just YouTube's ones.]

youtube downloader still works!

You're right! Thanks for the info. Actually, earlier today I had found
that it worked - and I was just about to post news of my success.

I had started off trying to install Youtube-DL - but found it needed (or
might need, depending on what the forums said) Python - and if it did
need Python, only V2.7 would do for XP. It all seemed complicated and
far from cut-and-dried, so I decided to shelve it for the moment.

I then turned my attention to DownloadHelper - only to find that it
needed Download Helper Companion App - and that Companion App would not
install on this PC ("not a valid Win32 application").

I then looked at some of the other Firefox addons for Youtube and some
stand-alones (many of which I had used before, but found no longer
worked, or had discarded for other reasons). By chance I tried Youtube
Downloader (which I'm sure I've used before), and it worked fine.
--
Ian