Make an offline copy of a YouTube video.As part of my gathering and thinking I decided to store a copy of the interesting YouTube videos on my own Mac. After some searching I discovered this particularly useful technique:
I’m preparing to present a keynote at a conference in April. Right now I’m just gathering ideas and resources, but there are several YouTube videos I may be interested in showing.
you can get the FLV that is being played without additional software, by playing a video in Safari with the Activity window open. You should see one entry that is increasing in size, up to some number of megabytes. Option-double click on that entry, and the FLV will download.Make an offline copy of a YouTube video
Once you have it you cannot play it in the latest Flash Player, that only plays swfs, and this is an FLV. If you install the Perian components (http://www.perian.org/) you can then play the FLV in QuickTime Player.
You may need to rename the file that gets downloaded. Just call it what you like, with .flv at the end.
As any presenter knows, if the Internet’s involved it doesn’t pay to rely on being able to go online — it’s best to have offline copies of resources, just in case.
[I remember running one training session a few years ago, about how to use the Internet, where the connection died at the beginning of the session, with no hope of getting it back up and running that day …]
Result for: flash video
How to convent Youtube videos to ipod or psp?So many videos on this popular video-sharing site, YouTube.com, but no way to save them for your iPod or PSP.
Know any tricks?
Sincerely,
I Want My Portable TV
Dear TV,
YouTube displays its videos embedded in a Flash player with no way to download them to your hard drive. Luckily, videoblogger Josh Kinberg provides a Greasemonkey script that helps you do just that. (Non Firefox/Greasemonkey users, a bookmarklet’s available in the comments at that link as well.) Once the script is enabled, click on the “Save as to download Flash video” at the top of any YouTube video page.The file you’re prompted to download will be called “get_video.php” or somesuch. Be sure to change the filename to something with a .flv extension, which is a Flash movie.
Once you’ve got the Flash movie saved, it’s time to convert it. If you’re on a Windows PC, try iTinySoft Total Video Converter. Mac users, try the ffmpegX utility [via Mac Dev Center].
Result for: flash video
Now if you download videos directly from Youtube with the common methods like using the Internet Cache, download managers like Orbit Downloader or Firefox extensions like Download Helper you still end up with flv files.
Until recently all videos provided by Youtube were encoded as flash videos in the format .flv. With the recent addition of high resolution videos, or lets say higher resolutions than before, Youtube now provides mp4 videos of most videos on site as well.
If you want to download Youtube videos as mp4 files right now you can use one of two options. The first is provided by a bookmarklet that can be used in Firefox, Opera and Internet Explorer. The Get Bookmarklet [via Google OS]has to be saved as a bookmark, best way would be to drag it into the bookmarks toolbar for fast access. While bookmarklets are nice they require action for every video that you want to download, not that great.
A better solution is to use a Greasemonkey script that adds the functionality to Firefox automatically. Download Youtube Videos as MP4 is a small Greasemonkey Script that adds a Download as MP4 link beneath the video information box on the right pane of the video page. You need to right-click that link and select Save As from the menu to download the video as mp4.
