Explainer · macOS

Is it safe to download YouTube videos?

Two different questions hide inside that one. Will this harm my Mac? is a question you can answer yourself in about thirty seconds. Am I allowed to do this? is the one most people are actually asking, and it deserves a straighter answer than the software industry usually gives it.

Part one: will it harm my Mac?

This one is checkable, and the checks work on any Mac app — not just ours. You do not have to trust a download page's word for it.

Check it is signed and notarised

Notarisation means Apple has scanned the app for malware and issued a ticket saying so. It is not a quality judgement, but it is a real malware scan by a party with no stake in the app selling. Open Terminal and run this against any app in your Applications folder:

spctl -a -vvv /Applications/ReelPull.app

A notarised app answers:

/Applications/ReelPull.app: accepted
source=Notarized Developer ID
origin=Developer ID Application: BYTE BRIDGES SOLUTIONS LTD (6XA2G83FY5)

source=Notarized Developer ID is what a directly-downloaded app should say, and origin= names who signed it — for ReelPull, Byte Bridges Solutions Ltd.

Two other sources are equally fine: Mac App Store and Apple System are Apple's own channels, so Pages or Music answering differently is not a problem. What you are looking for is rejected, or a source you cannot account for. If you get rejected, or the source says anything else, stop and find out why.

Check who actually signed it

codesign -dvv /Applications/ReelPull.app 2>&1 | grep Authority

which prints the certificate chain:

Authority=Developer ID Application: BYTE BRIDGES SOLUTIONS LTD (6XA2G83FY5)
Authority=Developer ID Certification Authority
Authority=Apple Root CA

This prints the real legal identity Apple issued the certificate to. Compare it with the company the website claims to be. A mismatch is a red flag; an app that refuses to answer at all is a bigger one.

The thing to actually be suspicious of. The genuine malware risk in this category is not the download itself — it is ad-funded "converter" websites that wrap a real download in a fake one. If a site opens new tabs you did not ask for, runs a countdown before letting you download, or hands you a .dmg when you asked for a video, close it. That is the pattern worth avoiding, and it is a property of the site, not of downloading.

Prefer tools that do not ask you to upload anything

A desktop app processes the video on your Mac. A web-based converter needs the file, or the link, to pass through someone else's server. Neither is automatically unsafe, but they are different trust decisions, and only one of them keeps your files on your own machine and needs no account. (Downloading obviously needs the internet either way. ReelPull's licence checks are what run locally — there is nothing to log into.)

Part two: am I allowed to?

We build software, not legal advice, and nothing below is a substitute for it. This is a plain-English sketch of how the rules generally work, not guidance on your situation.

Here is the honest version, which is less comfortable than most vendor pages will tell you.

YouTube's Terms of Service do not permit downloading except where the Service itself expressly authorises it — a download button or link — or where you have prior written permission from YouTube and, where relevant, the rights holder. That is their contract with you, and installing a different piece of software does not change it. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

That said, "against a platform's terms" and "illegal" are not the same thing, and the question that actually matters — copyright — depends entirely on whose video it is and what you plan to do with it.

Where the rights question is straightforward

Your own uploads. You hold the copyright, so there is no infringement question at all — and it is one of the most common real reasons people need a downloader. Worth knowing, though, that YouTube's own terms still point you at Studio's download button rather than a third-party tool, so this is clean on copyright and not automatically clean on contract.
Creative Commons licensed material, used within that licence's terms. YouTube marks these in the video description, and its only Creative Commons option is CC BY — which always requires attribution.
Footage you have licensed, or that a client has supplied and confirmed they own.
Public domain material.

Where it clearly is not

Taking someone else's video and republishing it, monetising it, or passing it off as yours. The platform's terms are the least of your problems there; that is straightforward copyright infringement.
Anything from a subscription streaming service. More on that below.

The grey middle

Most countries have some exception for criticism, review, quotation, news reporting, research or parody — fair dealing in the UK, fair use in the US, and neither works the way internet arguments assume. They are defences assessed case by case on the specific use, not a category of video you are allowed to take. Whether yours qualifies is a question for a solicitor who knows your facts, and it is genuinely one of the harder areas of copyright law. We are a software company; this page is not legal advice and cannot be.

What we will say plainly: if you are downloading a stranger's video and you cannot articulate why your use is covered, assume it is not.

Why DRM is a hard line

Subscription streaming services — Netflix, Disney+, Prime and the rest — encrypt what they send you. Getting around that encryption is a separate legal wrong in most jurisdictions, distinct from copyright infringement itself and written into laws specifically about circumvention. In the United States that is section 1201 of the DMCA; in the UK it is sections 296 to 296ZF of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the EU has its own equivalent.

This is why ReelPull refuses those services outright rather than trying and failing. It is not a feature we have not got around to, and it is not something a future version will add. A tool that circumvents DRM is a different category of thing, legally, and we are not building one.

We should be clear that this is not a claim to be unusual. Other well-regarded tools in this space take the same position, and at least one free open-source project words it better than we do. It is a line worth stating, not a boast.

Where ReelPull sits in this

For transparency, because it affects how you judge everything above: ReelPull is a native Mac app built around yt-dlp and ffmpeg, two long-standing open-source projects. We did not invent the downloading. What we built is the part that makes them safe to use without a terminal — a signed, notarised app that keeps both engines updated, refuses DRM services, and turns a pasted link into a file that drops onto a Final Cut Pro or Premiere timeline.

The licence details of everything we bundle are on our licences page, and what we have shipped and when is on the changelog, so you can check the "we keep it updated" claim rather than take it.

If you have used yt-dlp directly and it has stopped working, that is usually one of three specific things rather than anything sinister — we wrote them up here.

Nothing about the app changes the answer in part two. The rights question is about the video, not the tool.