This youtube helper site still works nicely for me:
https:/ /video.genyt.xyz/xxxxxxx?dl=1
And the best: aside from the usual "big" downloads, they still offer
tiny 3gp-files too, and surprisingly still directly from yt!
The only chance for ultraslow connections and/or full disks and/or old browsers. Even if 144p-3gp-videos have only stamp size, but as I wrote above already:
Quote
still a lot better than nothing. Although very blurry when zoomed to fullscreen, but in most cases that's secondary, especially for just info clips, and sound is normal anyway.
And if a video duration is extremely short then I can also grab the smallest mp4 version instead (240p?), with much better visual quality.
For getting comments shown in old browsers this one looks good for me:
https:/ /ruclips.net/video/xxxxxxx/
Although some videos first don't seem to have any, but recently discovered they may still appear on genyt...