Downloading videos

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Sites like YouTube don’t have an easy down­load option. But a lot of soft­ware and sites have come out to help down­load You Tube videos as well as video from oth­er, sim­i­lar sites. This guide to down­load­ing YouTube is a sur­vey of the tech­niques and meth­ods in cur­rent use, although this is not an endorse­ment or rec­om­men­da­tion of any of them. There’s also a com­pi­la­tion of var­i­ous guides, includ­ing how-to videos.

A while back, CNET reviewed some of this soft­ware.

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Web-based downloaders

With these, you enter the address of a youtube.com video, and you’ll be brought to a new page where you can save and even some­times con­vert it.

downloadyoutubevideos.com (warn­ing on all the ads and pop­ups)

Here’s anoth­er one… and even Techcrunch had a clean-look­ing YouTube down­loader, but it’s been appar­ent­ly dis­abled by YT itself.

vixy.net is an online FLV con­vertor. Enter the URL and go. Con­verts to Divx+mp3, MPEG4, and audio only (mp3).

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Stand-alone software

These are pro­grams that you run on your com­put­er (out­side of a web brows­er) to down­load videos.

YouTube Down­loader appar­ent­ly works for Win­dows.

For Lin­ux (and oth­er unices, not doubt) there’s clive, which is billed as a “video extrac­tion util­i­ty for YouTube” and oth­er online video sites.
[home­page] [png screen­shot] [debian pack­age]

Peteris Kru­mins also has a few inter­est­ing meth­ods, includ­ing one way to tonmat.net/blog/downloading-youtube-videos-with-gawk/”>download online videos using GAWK and a tonmat.net/blog/downloading-youtube-videos-with-a-perl-one-liner/”>Perl one-lin­er. Nice!

Video download tutorials and guides

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There’s more info on this top­ic out there, from to-download-you-tube-videos”>discussions to arti­cles like
Chris Pir­il­lo’s “to-download-you-tube-videos/”>How to Down­load You Tube Videos.”

Final­ly, you can watch videos to tell you how. Instructa­bles has a video tutor­i­al, and you can see many more out there includ­ing some on the youtubes them­selves: 1, 2, torial_download_you_tube_files_easy/”>3, 4.

For further reference

Need more? Here’s hun­dreds.