YouTube publishers and YouTube may use age restrictions to limit a video’s accessibility on the website. Users get a “sign in to confirm your age” message when they try to open such a video on YouTube.
The most recent Xbox Developer Direct video is age restricted.
Age-restricted content does not violate YouTube’s community guidelines, but it may be “incompatible with YouTube’s terms of service or not appropriate for viewers under 18” according to Google.
Google gives a few examples of types of videos that may be age-restricted. This includes videos with violent or graphic content, nudity or sexually suggesting content, vulgar language, or videos with harmful or dangerous activities.
If you are an adult and have a Google account, you may sign-in to watch the video on YouTube. Not everyone has a Google account on the other hand or wants to sign-in to watch certain videos.
You find a tutorial on bypassing YouTube’s sign in to confirm your age prompt to watch the video in a browser. Another option that is available is to download the age restricted video to the local system to watch it in a local player instead.
Problem is, most download options do not work without a YouTube account. If you search for options to download YouTube videos that are age restricted, you find most tutorials still require that you sign-in to an account.
In this guide, I show you one option to download these YouTube videos. Note that this method is also limited, but it does not require an account.
Disclaimer: there are numerous ways to bypass YouTube’s age restricted prompt. Children should not use any of the methods to bypass them. With that said, the prompt won’t keep anyone from watching videos as it is not checking the “real age” of users accessing the content.
Download age-restricted YouTube videos without account
I tried several YouTube video downloaders and most do not support the downloading of age restricted content without YouTube or Google account.
Any Video Converter Free is the exception. It can download these videos, and any other video, from YouTube.
Note: the free version has one limitation. It limits downloads to a maximum quality of 720p. A paid version is available that lifts the restriction.
Here are the steps required to download these videos from YouTube:
- Install Any Video Converter Free on your Windows PC.
- Run the program after installation.
- Select Video Download on the startpage.
- Paste the video URL into the field that opens. You may add multiple videos.
- Click on the analyse button.
- Click on Start to being the download of the video. You may modify output settings here, but the best video quality that is available in the free version is already selected.
You may now play the downloaded video in any compatible video player.
One effect of the downloading is that you do not have to worry about ads on YouTube.
Testing the age-restricted Xbox Developer Direct [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELFSdlFmDNI] video …
1. Valid, working Piped [https://github.com/TeamPiped/Piped] instances would not play the video.
2. Accessing the video via YouTube embedded displayed the video : [https://www.youtube.com/embed/ELFSdlFmDNI ]
BE NOTED : Cookies here are blocked for Google and YouTube domains, for whatever this may explain why YouTube (at least embedded) age-restriction was bypassed.
3- Downloading the video : I use the ‘9XBuddy’ online video downloader [https://9xbuddy.in/] which accepts url parameters, in this case [https://9xbuddy.in/process?url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELFSdlFmDNI].
9XBuddy processed correctly the download link (took perhaps 2 minutes given the file size) … yet I didn’t download afterwards the 1.15GB mp4 file 🙂 given the testing purpose only.
What I mean by referring to 9XBuddy is that online downloaders can achieve the process without having to bother ourselves with workarounds. Be noted that there is a plethora of video downloaders on the Web and that not all are “healthy”. In my experience 9XBuddy is healthy and does the job flawlessly.