posted by Admin on 3/30/11 · Comments
How Do I Download Youtube Videos?: Tips for Downloading Streaming Media Safely
If you're new to YouTube, or streaming media in general, you've no doubt wondered how you can download your favorite videos directly from YouTube to your computer. The concept seems so simple yet YouTube, and nearly all streaming media providers, have somehow neglected to implement this functionality into their interfaces. There is a good reason for this. YouTube's main income is derived from advertising sold on video pages. The more hits their videos get, the more valuable they are to advertisers. By making it difficult for users to access their videos outside of YouTube they ensure that users will come back to the site again and again, further ensuring the company's value to its advertisers.
Fortunately for us, and somewhat unfortunately for YouTube, there are dozens of addons, plugins, and standalone applications meant to enable users to download streaming media from any number of online sources. Though if you're like me, you don't need another unitasker freeware app that you'll use once in a blue moon to download a particularly interesting YouTube video, but will just take up space on your hard drive the rest of time. The only alternative then is a browser plugin or addon. While the browser extentions in question make it undeniably easy to download streaming media, many allow you to do so in one click, I find that most of them are quite clunkly and a major drag on the overall speed of my browser. Unbeknownst to many web surfers, the more addons or plugins you have enabled in your browser the slower that browser will function. So, you may be pulling down videos on your 100mb broadband connection but if you've got 25 clunky FireFox addons running in the background you may still end up waiting for your favorite videos to buffer or load.
So what's the solution? Believe it or not, each time you watch a streaming video your computer actually downloads the entire video and stores it on your hard drive. Streaming videos are generally saved to your temporary internet files folder. This folder is full of all of the images and text files your browser uses to display each website you visit. By changing some of the settings on your computer you can actually access these files and copy downloaded videos to your desktop or the folder of your choice. That way you can watch it whenver you want!
Getting Started:
Before we dive into operating system specific solutions I want to take a moment to address YouTube video formats and playback options. Videos hosted on youtube are automatically converted upon upload to FLV (Flash Video) format. YouTube converts videos to this format to save on both space and loading time as FLV files tend to be significantly smaller than other video formats but retain video quality. Despite these obvious advantages, many popular media players, like Apple's Quicktime player and Window's Media player, do not support playback of this file type. In order to play these files on your computer you will need a media player that supports FLV video playback. There are two very populer alternative media players that support this format and both are free to download. I strongly recommend that you download one of the following media players before you download any videos directly from YouTube:
VLC Media PlayerAdobe Media Player
VLC Media is actually my media player of choice as it supports a plethora of video formats and can be updated to support new formats as they are developed.
Solution For Mac Users:
For those luckly Mac users out there, Apple has integrated an embedded media download option directly into the Safari web browser. Using the following 6 step process you should be able to easily access any YouTube or streaming media file and download it directly to your downloads folder:
- Launch Safari and navigate to YouTube.
- Click play on the video of your choice and wait for it to load completely.
- Hold the Apple (command), Option, and 'A' keys down while you double click on the video. This should bring up the Safari "Activity Monitor".
- In the Activiy Monitor window find the *.flv file (usually the largest file in the monitor window) and Double click on it. Safari will automatically download the video file to your downloads folder.
- Navigate to your downloads folder and rename the file with your desired file name.
- Enjoy!
Solution For Windows Users:
The solution for Windows users requires quite a few more steps and a bit more resolve, but once you get the hang of it, it'll be second nature. For users that prefer Firefox, Chrome or another alternative browser, you'll have to break out your current version of Internet Explorer for this.
For Windows XP and previous Windows versions:
- Open Internet Explorer and Navigate to YouTube.
- Click play on the video of your choice and wait for it to load completely.
- Open the Windows Control Panel and click the switch to classic view option in the sidebar.
- Click on Folder Options.
- Click on the "View" Tab and scroll down to the hidden files and folders section.
- Click the radio button labelled "Show hidden files and folders" and make sure that the "Hide extensions for known file types" and "Hide protected operating system files" checkboxes are unchecked
- Exit the control panel and go to My Computer.
- Double click on the C drive (or whichever drive windows is installed on).
- Double click on Documents and Settings.
- Double click on your user name folder.
- Double click on Local Settings.
- Double click on the Temporary Internet Files folder.
- Click view and select "details".
- Organize the folder by file size, largest first, by clicking on the "Size" column.
- All video files from YouTube have file names starting with "videoplayback?sparams=id" followed by several percent signs and a lot of numbers and letters. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't name video files according to YouTube title, if you've watched a lot of YouTube videos recently it may take you some time to find the video you're looking for.
- Start by copying one video file at a time over to your desktop. Once you've copied a file to your desktop rename the file "filename_of_your_choice.flv".
- Open the file in your media player to see if it's the right video. If not, move it to the trash and repeat the previous step until you find the video you want.
*tip* You can get a pretty good idea which video is which based on the size. Longer videos will have larger file sizes. - Once you've found the right video rename the file with your desired file name.
- Enjoy!
For Vista and Windows 7:
- Open Internet Explorer and Navigate to YouTube.
- Click play on the video of your choice and wait for it to load completely.
- Open the Windows Control Panel and click the switch to classic view option in the sidebar.
- Click on Folder Options.
- Click on the "View" Tab and scroll down to the hidden files and folders section.
- Click the radio button labelled "Show hidden files and folders" and make sure that the "Hide extensions for known file types" and "Hide protected operating system files" checkboxes are unchecked
- Navigate to your system drive.
- Paste "Usersname\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\" (without quotes) into the navigation bar and hit enter.
- Double click on the Temporary Internet Files folder.
- Click view and select "details".
- Organize the folder by file size, largest first, by clicking on the "Size" column.
- All video files from YouTube have file names starting with "videoplayback?sparams=id" followed by several percent signs and a lot of numbers and letters. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't name video files according to YouTube title, if you've watched a lot of YouTube videos recently it may take some time to find the video you're looking for.
- Start by copying one video file at a time over to your desktop. Once you've copied a file to your desktop rename the file "filename_of_your_choice.flv".
- Open the file in your media player to see if it's the right video. If not, move it to the trash and repeat the previous step until you find the video you want.
*tip* You can get a pretty good idea which video is which based on the size. Longer videos will have larger file sizes. - Once you've found the right video rename the file with your desired file name.
- Enjoy!
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