[Airwavez]

Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive

From Wired How-To Wiki

YouTube and other video sharing sites provide endless hours of wholesome, time-wasting entertainment. But what if you want to watch movies without the browser? There's no direct or easy way to download YouTube videos from the site, but thankfully there are ways to make a local copy for personal use. A number of tools exist to save youtube videos for playback on your computer, iPod, iPhone, PSP and even your boring old DVD player.
Using Firefox

The easiest solution if you're a Firefox user is to install the [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] add-on. Download Helper can handle much more than just YouTube -- in fact the add-on can grab just about any media file from nearly any source and download it to your machine. There are also a couple of other Firefox plugins, notably [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], though the latest YouTube site update seems to be interfering with Video Downloader's ability to grab video for some users.
Using Other Desktop Software

If you're not a Firefox user, don't worry, there's some other options. [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] is a Windows program that will download movies from YouTube, though it will set you back $30 (there's a free trial that allows for 10 downloads so you can test it).


Mac users looking to go from YouTube straight over to your video iPod or AppleTV have a couple options. There's [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] which will download and convert files from YouTube, Daily Motion and MySpace. PodTube 2 is $5. [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] offers similar features, though it only handles YouTube videos, and costs $15.


The latest [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] (version 11, a beta release, is $30 and supports Windows XP and Vista only) has the ability to download and burn videos clips from YouTube and other sites like Google Video and MySpace Video. The player will automatically add a "Download" link button to video pages in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once downloaded, you can use the player to watch the videos or burn them to a DVD.


Although it hasn't been released yet, there's also a lot of talk surrounding [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], which looks a bit like iTunes applied to YouTube. Look for Tubular to enter the public beta phase later this year.


And finally, the most primitive -- but definitely free and working -- method is to use [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]. Just paste in the YouTube URL and SaveTube will find the cached file and give you a download link. Here is a collection of some other free [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] to save youtube videos.


What to Do With Your Downloaded Video

Unless you're using one of the all-in-one solutions listed above, once you've pulled down the Flash FLV file from YouTube or another video sharing site, you'll need to convert it to another format for viewing in QuickTime (which includes iTunes and AppleTV) or Windows Media Player.


If you just want to direct convert FLV online and save your favorite FLV to psp, ipod, zune, DVD, I suggest you directly use this [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] For mac users: As currently, there is no one ideal FLV converter for MAC, so here I suggest use the follow to tool to realise our purpost. First [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], iSquint is an Free iPod video conversion app for Mac OS X. use iSquint to convert FLV to mp4. Then use video converter for mac to convert mp4 video to any video format you want. [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] , [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] For More information on How to deal with your FLV file, just log on to this site: [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] with all popular FLV converter, including FLV decoder, encoder and player. but FLV player list on this site is not very powerful, you can directly download [Only registered and activated users can see links. ]- currently the most powerful video player, totally Free!


You can use [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] to convert the .flv file to any popular video formats. Also some other [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] you could use.


Alternately you can just use an FLV capable media player like the excellent and free [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] (all platforms).To convert your FLV file on a Mac you can use [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], which is free though limited to output in MP4, or through the aforementioned TubeSock. For Windows folks there's [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], which is free, or [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], which costs $30. Both support a wide range of output options.
Mac and Windows users can also try [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], though Windows folks will need to download the Windows version of Apple QuickTime, which is also free.


Linux users can turn to [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] (which also works on OS X and Windows).



You'll need a little command line juice, but this conversion script should get you started:

 ffmpeg -i myFile.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320×240 myFile.mpg

And there you have it, now you can watch your YouTube favorites anywhere you'd like in nearly any video format you can name.

[Reddox]

Nice, there's also a site that does most of this (besides the converting...)

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[MaiN]

Originally Posted by Airwavez

The easiest solution if you're a Firefox user is to install the [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] add-on. Download Helper can handle much more than just YouTube -- in fact the add-on can grab just about any media file from nearly any source and download it to your machine. There are also a couple of other Firefox plugins, notably [Only registered and activated users can see links. ], though the latest YouTube site update seems to be interfering with Video Downloader's ability to grab video for some users.

Not true.
[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

[Tkiller]

Or just go on w w w. converttube.com

[Runez]

Or use the program from [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] which can both download the youtube videos and convert them to various formats (AVI, MOV etc.).

[afghan4life]

Here is the easiest way (the way i always do it)

go to :

www.keepvid.com

Put in your youtube link, download the flv. Rename the file to blah.flv (or whatever.flv)

Then go to

www.media-convert.net

Upload your flv, and choose the output.

[Zero-]

There is Also Vixy.net it converts to .avi .mov .mp4 and .mp3

[project anthrax]

nice i can get some movies off this also

[azzkikr]

thanks for this, never really could figure it out

[The Maffyx]

I use [Only registered and activated users can see links. ] works fine for me, it converts to other formats as well.

[Giorgio Armani]

http://i28.tinypic.com/2s92a6r.png

Ever heard of that program?

[reidhaseyes]

or you could go the super easy way and go to:

[Only registered and activated users can see links. ]

and type in the link. this also works for myspace movies/music and everything else.
its self explanatory.