Written by In the past when I wanted to download a Youtube video, I used Arestube – which worked like a charm. Lately though, I suspect that Youtube has made some changes to their security, and now Arestube can’t download their video’s anymore. Pity, cause I was a loyal Arestube fan.
There are also various sites which claim that you can download Youtube video’s from them, but none of these worked for me – all of them giving an error that the Youtube file couldn’t be found.
I then started looking around for another way to get Youtube video’s on my hard drive, and had searched high and low for a software app which would enable me
to do this.
Finally I came up with the following steps…
Firefox (browser) has a add-on which you can install to download Youtube video’s, called Download Helper. Once you have that installed, you can download Youtube video’s to your harddrive as .flv files. Not many standard
players are able to play this format though, so off I went, in search of a new player, or codec for one of my existing players.
I found Combined Community Codec Pack [6.06MB], which is a codec that enables
you to view .flv video files in Media Player. This is all very grand if you just want to use the video on your own computer, but if you want to forward this
video to a friend, you’d have to send them the codec pack as well as the video file.
So now I had to find a converter for .flv files, to .wmv or .mov files. *sigh*
On Download.com,I managed to find Total Video Converter [5.12MB] for free.
Using that I was able to convert my .flv files to .wmv- which are usually played by all standard Windows Media Players. The only downside to that converter is that it places a link to their website in the top left corner of the video, but if you can live with that, its great.
Its quite a hassle as you can see, but once you have all the components installed it should take so much time.
I have made some youtube downloaders in gawk, perl and vbscript.
Here are the articles:
youtube downloaders (at my catonmat.net blog).
Browse around the blog to find articles on converting youtube videos to .wmv, .avi, etc. I wrote some posts on that.
Have fun,
peter@catonmat
All these sites work for me:
keepvid.com
downloadyoutubevideos.com
javimoya.com
Here is a nice web site where you can search, view and download YouTube videos.
http://www.ilikeyoutube.com/
Enjoy.
None of those sites worked for me, as of lately.
I seriously think Youtube has changed some of their security settings / parameters.
There has been some changes with Youtube,
but it works now :
http://www.ilikeyoutube.com/
Good Day Guru, I am glad I pressed harder enough until I found flv to avi converter, because this post on was extremely helpful. Just last Saturday I was pondering on this quite a bit.
i just downloaded one from YOUTUBE using ares tube, it downloads, but the stoopid program downloads it as flv then converts itto a file with an icon saying mpeg, but the properties say movie clip!!! and windows media player wont play the file as the clip was converted with a codec stoopid windows media player doesnt understand. So lets all rename the stoopid program….arsetube, cause its a pile of crap. just another flv program
i have always used the FREE video lan converter or vlc player to play all my multimedia files. I’ve recently came across a website that offers a Windows software that can download videos from youtube.
Not a mac user here, so I cant recommend a software for mac. Try download helper for firefox.