We all watch interesting videos on YouTube and often want to share it later with friends and family. If you don’t know how to download YouTube videos your only choice is log on the internet and find that video again. I get frustrated looking for the same video again and this lovely experience turns into a project.
I actually watched a video on YouTube on how to download YouTube videos. In all honesty I was unable to follow it properly. I was able to download but it wouldn’t play in either QuickTime or Windows Media Player. I was getting incompatible codec error. Being a novice, I tried few times and gave up.
But I did some research and found as a policy YouTube does not allow downloading of videos. Here is the verbiage from YouTube Terms and Conditions: “You may access User Submissions for your information and personal use solely as intended through the provided functionality of the YouTube Website. You shall not copy or download any User Submission unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the YouTube Website for that User Submission.”
But you are allowed to download video if you see “download,” marked. It is usually on the top left. With this knowledge I searched for tools to streamline YouTube videos. A simple search on Google displays several options- some you have pay few Beta applications you can download.
You may have noticed that YouTube videos are actually in Flash format or FLV. Challenge here is how to capture and convert FLV format so you can watch on your desktop using media player of your choice. I found option of downloading FLV player in which case I wouldn’t have to convert (unless you want to watch it on your iPod).
List of applications available for Windows and Mac are rather extensive. You may have to try a few to get a sense of which one works better. I had problem initially because some videos I downloaded from YouTube did not have .flv extension. Without .FLV extension my convertor wasn’t working either. So my challenge was how to save the YouTube downloaded video as .FLV.
I wasn’t sure what to do. To my surprise a YouTube video I had downloaded did not have any extension. I just added .flv at the end of the name and saved it. I also had to uncheck a box that said “hide extensions for known file types.”
Anyway once you have downloaded a software of your choice to convert .flv files and you have downloaded video from YouTube you may still run into issues. Sometime codec does not convert adequately. I was thinking this maybe an issue with the video but it was actually the server overload issue. So you may want to try at different times.