Dumb You Tube Question

How do you download clips from YouTube? I’m a moron and can’t seem to figure it out.  Please explain it to me in the comments. Thanks!

And thank you again, William Simon, for hooking me on the video crack. I can’t seem to get enough of all those main title sequences, which I often use as part of my course when I teach TV writing.

16 thoughts on “Dumb You Tube Question”

  1. Can’t be done, AFAIK. It’s streaming only – doesn’t even go to your cache when you watch it.
    Or, at the very least, I’ve never been able to yoink anything. My brain might just have stroked off a bit, of course…

    Reply
  2. You can,however, download from Google Video. YouTube is better when you want to stream it or embed it into something else.
    Google is horrible for embedding, but you can download from it. That said, YouTube has better content.

    Reply
  3. I’ve been to You Tube before, but I also could never to get them to run on my computer as well. Strange how the internet is doing things these days, instead of adding another cable channel for the feat.

    Reply
  4. You can though embed You Tube videos in your web page. Just look to the right of the video and you’ll get the link for embedding the video. Not sure if that helps at all.

    Reply
  5. what mary said — if you just want the embedded video here. cut and paste the code which is fairly long. most of the time it won’t show up when you do a preview, but once you actually post you can see it.
    it was great to finally meet you in madison!

    Reply
  6. The Particulars:
    YouTube doesn’t do anything tricky to prevent you from downloading video files. But the direct URL to the file is only visible inside the descriptive code for the video’s webpage.
    There are ways of smoking the file out, but wht bother. Use KeepVid…it’s a free webservice: http://www.keepvid.com. Paste in the URL to the YouTube video page and it’ll generate a downoad link for the actual video file.
    Problem Two is that the file is in a format called “Flash,” which none of your desktop software can probably play. So download VLC, the world-standard “free and plays everything” media player that you ought to have anyway:
    http://www.videolan.org/vlc/
    If you want to integrate these videos into your presentations, you’ll want to convert them to QuickTime or Windows Media. There are a bunch of utilities that can do that…depends on what you’re using and what you want to do with the files.

    Reply
  7. I use the Firefox link as well, although the flash player I use will only play a title called “video.flv”, so I have to rename the titles.
    I’ll be checking into VLC.
    I think here’s how the procedure works: with the Firefox extension installed, go to youtube and find a video. When you’ve reached the video’s page, click on the extension (it’ll be installed in the lower right hand corner). A half-pane window will appear announcing that it’s captured the link, and you have to click on the “Download This” button.
    When it’s finished, the viddie should be in your Temp folder, to play with as you see fit.
    (One warning: I’m doing this from memory. I have succeeded in downloading vids with it.)

    Reply
  8. first open firefox, download the video downloader
    https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/
    then you have to close firefox, reopen so the whole thing so it resets itself
    then you go to the youtube video you want, click the little button on the bottom right of firefox, and download it
    I personally never found problem whether or not I rename the video .flv
    and you follow the person mentioned above play the video using VLC player.
    if you have Windows XP, then you can convert VLC into Windows Media Player playable file format. Hope this helps.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLV#External_links

    Reply
  9. I love when people make stuff up.
    VLC is not a “world-standard” and it hardly “plays everything”. It will not in fact play any flash 8 or 9 video at all. 8&9 are just containers for VP6, and VLC does not support this as of right now.
    YouTube videos are in fact saved in your browser cache, you just have to look for them.
    The last time I looked, keepvid was down because it is horribly unreliable and the firefox add-on just takes you to keepvid.com. The greasemonkey script is out of date and stopped working quite some time ago.
    Don’t bother.

    Reply
  10. Hmm. Funny. KeepVid is up as of ten seconds ago, it’s always worked every time I’ve used it, and the instructions “Copy the URL to keepvid.com and then click the Download link” is a lot easier for an average user to successfuly explot than “the video file’s there; just look for it.”
    Re: VLC — it plays .flv videos from KeepVid just fine. But then, the last time I checked was about an hour ago, so my information could be out of date.
    “World-Standard” – absolutely, in the sense that it’s a robust app with the active and ongoing support of a large worldwide development community, is one-stop shopping for most of the formats that a user is likely to encounter, and is One Of Those Apps that most people who enjoy Internet video rely on at one time or another. And it’s free.

    Reply

Leave a Comment