To do this you need a tool called UnPlug which is a Firefox Add-On, so you don’t have to be a genius to understand that you need Firefox.

UnPlug is an extension which lets you save video and audio which is embedded on a webpage, it’s a video download tool. You can install it from here

UnPlug scans web pages and tells you where media players are getting their data from, and displays it as a simple hyperlink: in most cases, you can then follow the simple download link to save the media file.

1. Install UnPlug.
2. Go to a page from where you want to save a movie, I will choose Youtube.com
3. Right click somewhere on a empty space, on the page and select “UnPlug”.
4. You will be directed in a page that looks like this.
5. These are the links of the movie you’ve selected. Two or more links may appear if the movie appears twice on the page. Simply Click the last “save” at the right and download it. Enjoy!

and, for those of you that dont have firefox.. there is another (though more complex) way.
1) copy the video id from the url (the stuff after watch?v=)
2) view the source code, search for the video id until you get watch_fullscreen?video_id= After you find that, copy from "video_id=" up to "&nc="
3)go back to the page, and in the url type www.youtube.com/get_video? and paste in at the end what you copied from the source
4) let it download. if there's no file extension, you'll need to rename it so it has the extension .flv
5) enjoy

I've always wondered how some people did this .

master_nero, you sir are absolutely awesome!!!!

Me and the missus were watching some humerous stuff on youtube and I have been wondering if there was anything like this about so we could save it to harddisk and show it to her family (as they have an extremely low bandwidth limit, 400mb monthly lol).

I also thought if this is possible to do, because some of those videos are really awesome, but as I didn't even google, so didn't know, but what kind of format is those videos? for sometime I thought that those videos are converted to flash, but I guess flash player only plays those video/movie files? ;]

You can also download videos from sites like YouTube with the DownloadHelper extension for Firefox, which does not require you to even go to a second site to download. You just click on the little icon on the toolbar or in the menu, select the file to download, and there you go! Also, for Opera, there's the KeepVid extension where you can copy and paste the URL of the page that the video's on to download.



The filetype they are save in is .FLV or Flash Video File, which can be played on the free-to-download FLVPlayer which you can get at download.com

Serena

That is very interesting I never knew about this with all the time that I have used Firefox. But certain vidoes on youtube are too poor of quality to be owned. I prefer the download if the resolution was much better. But this may come in handy if I needed some movies that I must and needed to get my hands on and couldnt get anywhere else. Thanks for the tip.

I liked the GetVideo extension for Firefox, and it does pretty much its job ~ just that my Download Manager doesn't seem to get what's going on doesn't take over the download automatically. I didn't like the FLVPlayer, though. Its got nothing! It just Plays the given FLV File/URL and nothing else! My cell phone supports 3GP files, I wonder if I could get 'em converted to 3GP somehow?!

Besides, isn't this illegal? I mean there must me some reason Google didn't make a link for downloading the movies straight.. How else would they get repeated visitors to their site?! But it doesn't look like it as I found this extension on Mozilla's official website!


This post has been edited by Omkar™: Apr 25 2007, 01:26 PM

I dont know if its legal or illegal, would imagine its a site by site thing depending on their copyright setup and whatnot, but either way they'd prefer people NOT download the videos so you need to go back repeatedly if you want to rewatch it, thus seeing all their ads multiple times, thus being more likely to click them, thus being more likely to make them more money haha.

QED

Google allows for video downloading. I have lots of google videos on my disc, problem though is where google put them. You need google plex or something, an FLV equivalent player.