Download YouTube Videos the Easy Way

Posted by Trevor Bekolay on How to geek See other posts from How to geek or by Trevor Bekolay
Published on Mon, 15 Mar 2010 16:00:00 +0000 Indexed on 2010/03/15 16:10 UTC
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You can’t be online all the time, and despite the majority of YouTube videos being nut-shots and Lady Gaga parodies, there is a lot of great content that you might want to download and watch offline.

There are some programs and browser extensions to do this, but we’ve found that the easiest and quickest method is a bookmarklet that was originally posted on the Google Operating System blog (it’s since been removed). It will let you download standard quality and high-definition movies as MP4 files. Also, because it’s a bookmarklet, it will work on any modern web browser, and on any operating system!

Installing the bookmarket is easy – just drag and drop the Get YouTube video link below to the bookmarks bar of your browser of choice. If you’ve hidden the bookmark bar, in most browsers you can right-click on the link and save it to your bookmarks.

Get YouTube video

sshot-8

With the bookmarklet available in your browser, go to the YouTube video that you’d like to download.

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Click on the Get YouTube video link in your bookmarks bar, or in the bookmarks menu, wherever you saved it earlier.

sshot-2010-03-14-[21-32-31]

You will notice some new links appear below the description of the video.

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If you download the standard definition file, it will save as “video.mp4” by default.

sshot-4

However, if you download the high definition file, it will save with the same name as the title of the video.

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There are many methods of downloading YouTube videos…but we think this is the easiest and quickest method. You don’t have to install anything or use up resources, but you can still get a link to download an MP4 with one click.

Do you use a different method to download Youtube videos? Let us know about it in the comments!

javascript:
(function(){
if(document.getElementById(’download-youtube-video’))
return;
var args=null,video_title=null,video_id=null,video_hash=null;
var download_code=new Array();
var fmt_labels={
‘18′:’standard%20MP4′,’22′:’HD%20720p’,'37′:’HD%201080p’
}
;
try{
args=yt.getConfig(’SWF_ARGS’);
video_title=yt.getConfig(’VIDEO_TITLE’)
}
catch(e){
}
if(args){
var fmt_url_map=unescape(args['fmt_url_map']);
if(fmt_url_map==”)
return;
video_id=args['video_id'];
video_hash=args['t'];
video_title=video_title.replace(/[%22\'\?\\\/\:\*%3C%3E]/g,”);
var fmt=new Array();
var formats=fmt_url_map.split(’,');
var format;
for(var i=0;i%3Cformats.length;i++){
var format_elems=formats[i].split(’|');
fmt[format_elems[0]]=unescape(format_elems[1])
}
for(format in fmt_labels){
if(fmt[format]!=null){
download_code.push(’%3Ca%20href=\”+(fmt[format]+’&title=’+video_title)+’\'%3E’+fmt_labels[format]+’%3C/a%3E’)
}
else
if(format==’18′){
download_code.push(’%3Ca%20href=\’http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt=18&video_id=’+video_id+’&t=’+video_hash+’\'%3E’+fmt_labels[format]+’%3C/a%3E’)
}
}
}
if(video_id==null||video_hash==null)
return;
var div_embed=document.getElementById(’watch-embed-div’);
if(div_embed){
var div_download=document.createElement(’div’);
div_download.innerHTML=’%3Cbr%20/%3E%3Cspan%20id=\’download-youtube-video\’%3EDownload:%20′+download_code.join(’%20|%20′)+’%3C/span%3E’;
div_embed.appendChild(div_download)
}
}
)()

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