Downloading videos

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.

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).

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

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.