I\'m looking for software that would let me download YouTube videos as video fil

Question

I'm looking for software that would let me download YouTube videos as video files to the hard drive.

Don't care much about format being saved as long as Windows VLC can play it out of the box.
I'm not an expert on different formats of YouTube videos; if there are different ones, the software must support them all.
Must save both video and audio.

I strongly prefer

Freeware.
Automatic acknowledgement if some video triggers "18+ years only" warning.
Ability to download batches (e.g. GUI that accepts a list of URLs, OR command line interface with URL parameter that I can wrap in a loop in batch/Perl/Powershell script).
Save all URL links (to different videos or other sites) embedded in the YouTube video. Format doesn't matter - could be just a text file on the side.

Furthermore, it would be nice if the tool also considers the following options

Download video sets defined by YouTube, e.g. all uploads from a user; or entire channel.
Ability to remember download history, e.g. do "Download all videos from the channel you didn't already download".
Skip advertisements. Not an problem if it doesn't.

Furthermore

Windows platform (XP 32 bit compatible preferred but not required)
All things being equal (e.g. 100% same features and quality) standalone software is prefered over FF/Chrome plugins. But if a given plugin is better than anything standalone, I'm fine with a plugin.

Explanation / Answer

I use youtube-dl for downloading videos from YouTube. It's a free console program (public domain licence), written in Python. I've used it on Windows and Linux and it worked well. (According to the official site it should work on Mac OS X too.)

By default it downloads the video in the best quality provided by YouTube. If it's not playable with VLC you can get the available formats with

youtube-dl -F "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."

and set it with -f:

youtube-dl -f <formatId> "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..."

It downloads 18+ videos automatically without manual intervention.

You can download multiple videos with one command:

youtube-dl "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..." "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=..." ...

By default it uses the video ID as the filename (the value of the v parameter from the URL). I use it with -t which puts the title in filename with the video ID too so based on the video ID you can find your videos later online. (You can set it in a config file too.)
It supports YouTube channels (and many more).
If it finds the downloaded video in the current directory it does not download it again. (If it's not finished it continues the downloading.)

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