How to download and save YouTube video Roundup • 06.29.07
YouTube videos are very popular, and sometimes the videos only last a short time before they are removed because of copyright or other issues. Many people want to download these videos to their computer so they can save them, back them up, burn to a cd or dvd, rip and copy to their iPod, PSP, or other portable device. You may even want to convert them to 3gp format to put on your cell phone. YouTube doesn’t have a download option, so here are quite a few different ways down download the video yourself to your local computer. Some of these techniques can also be used to download video from google video, Metacafe, iFilm, mySpace, and many other sites (that use the flash video format).
Youtubex.com is a video download site that allows you to enter the URL of a Youtube video and immediantly download it. It doesn’t cost anything, the site makes it’s money from ad revenue. At least I didn’t see any annoying popups when I was there, it was just text based ads. Youtubex has links at the top of the page to also download MetaCafe videos, download google videos, download iFilm videos, and download mySpace videos.
TechCrunch also has a YouTube video download web tool where you just enter in the URL of the video and immediantly download the video. However, the format comes out in flv format (which Windows Media Player does not natively view). If you use this tool to download videos from YouTube, you will need to download and install the VideoLan player or FLV player.
VideoDL.org has the same type of download tool. You can also find the same type of tool at both Video Downloader 2.0, and Keepvid.com.
You can download YouTube and google video using bookmarklets. What is a bookmarklet? It’s a favorite or bookmark that you save in your browser that includes some code that will perform an action when you click on it instead of visiting a web site. In this case the action is saving the video for you. Many people prefer the bookmarklet to the web sites that assist in saving youtube flash video because of privacy concerns. Those web site have a record of what videos you saved, where if you use the bookmarklet there should only be a record of you accessing the video – saving it should occur locally on your pc.
Greasemonkey is a firefox add-on that allows you to customize the display of web pages using little pieces of javascript. Userscripts.org has thousands and thousands of scripts that you can download and use with the Greasemonkey add-on. There is of course a greasemonkey script that allows you to download youtube video. It works by adding a “download this video” link on every video you view on youtube (once installed).
Video Downloader is another Firefox Add-on that allows you to download youtube and google videos. This add-on might be a little easier, because it installs an icon on your browser bottom status bar, and when you are on a video page – you just click on the Video Downloader icon to download the video immediantly.
You can use Tubesock to download YouTube videos directly into iTunes if you have a Mac. So you can save and download youtube videos to your iPod, your Mac, and your PSP using Tubesock.
original post: 2007-01-03 14:43:04 -0400
