I recently discovered an alternative front end for YouTube called "Invidious." It blocks ads and gives you a download button. AFAICT, you can't comment on videos using it, but it does let you switch to YouTube if you really want to. Several sites host it worldwide, and you can find a list of approved instances on the main website.
There's also a Firefox extension called "Privacy Redirect" that can intercept requests for certain big data harvesting websites and redirect them to more privacy-oriented alternatives, e.g. YouTube embeds get redirected to Invidious automatically or Google map requests get redirected to OpenStreetMap. I suggest finding an Invidious instance that you feel comfortable using and setting that as your default in Privacy Redirect or it will pick an instance at random, a procedure which gave my antivirus fits.
YouTube blocks certain videos from third-party downloaders like Video DownloadHelper. I was able to use Invidious to download one such video.
There's also a Firefox extension called "Privacy Redirect" that can intercept requests for certain big data harvesting websites and redirect them to more privacy-oriented alternatives, e.g. YouTube embeds get redirected to Invidious automatically or Google map requests get redirected to OpenStreetMap. I suggest finding an Invidious instance that you feel comfortable using and setting that as your default in Privacy Redirect or it will pick an instance at random, a procedure which gave my antivirus fits.
YouTube blocks certain videos from third-party downloaders like Video DownloadHelper. I was able to use Invidious to download one such video.