There are times when you may need to record on-screen video, either for instruction or as a record of conversations or whatever. There are many solutions for this.
There may be times when you need to download, with permission, videos from YouTube etc for future reference. There are multiple solutions for this.
Here are the two things we choose. This is not advertising, paid or unpaid, or a recommendation, just a record of what we use. We have tried others, which for various reasons were rejected. These solutions are free, at the time of writing at least.
If you try either of these and have problems, we do not accept responsibility. Beware fake, scam sites.
Downloading from YouTube
After trying others that failed, we settled on this. Each time we use it, there is one advert for some kind of video editing thing, but it’s not intrusive and we delete it.
Copy the url for the video you want, paste it into the program, it will be ‘analysed’, then you can download it. You can enter more than one at a time, even whole queues for videos and just leave it to get on with the work.
In the settings, you can choose to shut down your computer when it is done.
Download times can be very short, or long depending on number and size of files and speed of connection.
Screen recording
We went for ShareX.
It’s free, and it does many things were are not interested in, We just use Capture|Screen recording.
To get sound, you may have to install a plug in, but it’s easy.
Select the region of the screen to be recorded and let the program do its work. At the end, click Stop. It may take a while for the video to be processed and saved.