Free Download Manager removes support for YouTube downloads

If you are using Free Download Manager, you may have noticed that the program cannot be used to download YouTube videos. You are not the only one facing the problem, it started a few days ago.

This is what happened.

Some users, discovering the lack of an option to search YouTube videos, filed a complaint with the official FDM. forums. A developer on the FDM team, Alex, responded to the thread saying that YouTube downloads are no longer available on the show. He also clarified that the team was discussing the problem with Google to find a solution.

When asked by users for more details, the developer said that FDM had received a complaint from Google and that they had to “turn off the YouTube downloads option.”

This was the reason the feature was removed from the popular show. We will come back to that in a moment.

Software is generally not subject to legal issues such as piracy, except in rare cases when a recordrandomly sends a DMCA or cease-and-desist order. Remember the youtubedl fiasco? Going back to the problem in question, Google prohibits extensions in the store from downloading YouTube videos. The FDM extension clearly doesn’t download the videos, it just sends the command to the program. The FDM desktop application, like many programs, is only a tool, and it is the user who decides how he wants to use the program. It’s a bit strange why the search giant went after Free Download Manager in particular, while similar programs haven’t been targeted.

The problem with FDM seems to have started with version 6.15.3 build 4234. If you have an older build, could you use it to download YouTube videos? Intrigued by this thought, I tried a slightly older version and it gave me a different error saying “Page cannot be rendered.”

So I went back to version 5 and it still gave me an error, but this time it said ‘Parse error. YouTube downloads are not available. ‘

Although it had the FDM extension installed in the browser, it was not using it to capture the media. I was manually copying the YouTube video URL and pasting it into the program. So why were older versions showing the error? Clearly this error is not specific to the version being used so it has to be a server related issue.

I can think of 2 possibilities. One, something has changed at the end of YouTube, which is causing the error. It seems unlikely since I was able to download the videos using other programs. The other theory is that Free Download Manager relies on an external YouTube download service, probably to analyze the video links (look up the metadata, URL, resolution, etc.) and send it to the program for download. I mentioned earlier that the developer had to “disable YouTube option”, this is probably the intermediary service that was removed.

The YouTube page on the FDM site has also been taken down, giving a 404. Here’s a version of the web archive from April 2021. The disappearance of the page seems like a serious problem and it is unclear if FDM will add support for downloads from YouTube again.

Meanwhile you can use other programs like YouTube-DL, yt-dlp, youtube-dl-gui, XDM, IDM, FireDM (formerly PyIDM). Take a look at our previous article for more ways to download videos.

Did you use FDM to download YouTube videos? What are your alternatives?

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