The main problem seems to be that many of youtube's videos split the audio and video apart and don't give you a high res audio video link from the basic url. Which mentions a website we'll use below. How to Watch YouTube (above 720p DASH streams) in VLC The following article was quite helpful in putting me onto this procedure. I'm using the Chromium 74.0 browser but I doubt that matters. Procedures should be similar on other systems. I've tried this on VLC 3.0.8 on Raspbian 10 (buster). Or, maybe some of you can write a script to do this. Maybe some of you developers can figure out how this works under the covers and incorporate it into VLC. Well, after hours and hours of searching, I've found one, although it's a bit kludgy. I've been virtually pulling my hair out trying to find a solution. I learned that VLC could play youtube videos, possibly better than the browser, but have also learned that it usually pulls up a low res video instead of the higher quality. I've set up a new Raspberry Pi 4 to serve as a driver for a video projector so I don't have to lug my laptop around. This turned out to be long, but bear with me.

At the bottom, I have some questions I need help with as well. I'm a newbie to the forum but am a long time user of VLC on multiple platforms including Windows, Linux, and now Raspbian (Raspberry Pi.) What I'm about to describe was done on my Raspberry Pi but I think it's applicable to other OS's. (I believe the following can be done on Windows even though I did it on Raspbian.)

Save youtube 1080p