hi,

does anybody know how to save a youtube video so that it can be played as a video file straight from my hard drive?

any help would be much appreciated,

gazza

There are a few ways to do this. You can either grab it from your cache as it's loaded in your browser, or you can have Safari download it straight to disk.

Here's how to get Safari to download it:

1. Load the page. You don't need to wait for the movie to finish loading, as long as it's started.

2. Select "Activity" from the Window menu.

3. You'll see a list of every URL in the current pages — images, html, css files, etc. Look for the one that's much bigger than all the rest. Hold down Option and double-click on it to begin the download.


And here's how to grab it from cache. This is a bit more complicated than the above method, but it has the advantage of not making you re-download movies that you already have fully loaded in Safari.

1. Let the movie load completely in Safari.

2. In the Finder, select "Go to Folder" from the Go menu, and enter "/var/tmp" (without the quotes, of course).

3. There should be a folder in there called "Folders.501", or possibly .502 or .503. Anyway, there will only be one such folder that you can open. Open it, and then open the TemporaryItems folder within.

4. Find a file called something like "FlshTmp01". That's your FLV. Drag it out to your desktop, rename is something meaningful like "Yet another movie about Mentos and Diet Coke.flv". Done!



Whatever method you use to snag the FLV, download Perian (http://www.perian.org) to allow you to play the FLVs with QuickTime.

brilliant - thanks very much for the info, mikuro

p.s. just noticed on version tracker that there are apps that can grab the videos for you.

thanks again

gazza

There's also a handy website-tool I'm using. I have a bookmark on the bookmark bar with the following URL, and I just hit that when I'm on the youtube-page I want the video from:


javascript:document.location='http://keepvid.com/?url='+escape(window.location);

FLV files play really nicely on you VLC Player.

If you have some time on your hands (4 mB file took around 8-10 minutes) you can also visit

http://vixy.net/

if you want it in Quicktime or multiple formats.

sod all that,

FLVR (http://www.tastyapps.com/).

integrates with safari, detects any flash video, and in 2 clicks, you have an iPod/iTunes-compatible MPEG-4 video file on your desktop and in iTunes.

Keep in mind that anything converting the FLVs to mp4 or avi or anything will reduce the quality. Then again, if you can stand YouTube videos, you're probably already immune to poor quality. ;)

TubeTv is even better http://www.chimoosoft.com/products/tubetv/#downloads
Or TubeSock http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/tubesock.html

TubeTV is cheaper, but i think FLVR is the best solution, even if it isn't free. it just doesn't discriminate between sites youtube, googlevid etc), it just finds FLV video and saves it. that's a major plus point.

I use Youtubex, manually add the .flv extension to the saved file and then drag and drop it into iSquint (free), to convert it to an mp4 file.

try dailymotion for many international videos you can't find anywhere else. i always find my french favorites--see mylene farmer for one. i think this must be the most popular site in france for videos. ~laura

keepvid.com and perian are good for veiwing youtube vids in quicktime