I'm looking for a good, reliable way to download embedded YouTube videos. These videos are not always accessible on YouTube.com, so the method can't be specific to that site. Thanks for any recommendations!
YT-DLP always works great for YouTube and some other sites. There are also a few browser extensions around, called similar to Video Download Helper. But don't install the super fishy ones, I don't know which of them are good.
This works for so many sites. Sometimes it is worth checking the formats the ste streams, because many of us don't really need that 4K clip of a video with lossless 7.1 surround sound audio.
It also works for podcasts.
Of you are on a site that has a stream that cannot be grabbed by yt-dlp you can look for other, sometimes sketchy, tools that can get the job done.
If you like to pull your hair out a bit, you can inspect the page (not look at the source, but use the web inspector) and find a link to the streams. Occasionally you may need to download the audio and the video separately and put them together after downloading.
In my experience nowadays video is often streamed with something like hls and pieced together with a javascript player. If that's the case inspecting the source won't help you much as its hundreds of 4s snippets or something like that. It could be worth a try but often times you really need a tool to do it.