How to save YouTube videos

YouTube, Daily Motion and the other online video sharing services have plenty of material to interest jazz fans and other music buffs, but, without exception, the services that we've been using for the videos here lack at least one potentially very useful feature: the ability to save a clip to your hard drive or other offline media.

One can understand why YouTube et al don't make it easy to save video clips - they're trying to attract as many eyeballs as possible to their sites, and letting users view the content offline pretty much defeats that purpose. But the Internet being what it is, one could also guess that someone else would come up with a way to make saving those clips possible, and sure enough, a number of "someones" have.

A simple solution is SaveYouTube.com, which does pretty much what the name implies. You copy the video URL you wish to download, paste it into the form on the site, and hit "download". Once the download is complete, you have to rename the file with an .flv extension.

You'll need a Flash video player to view the files in their native format; SaveYouTube.com has one you can download from their site, or you can use another player if that's more to your liking. Or, once you've got the files on your computer, you can use any one of many free video utilities to convert the file from Flash to another video format like .avi, .mpg or .mov.

There are a number of similar services, as well as manual ways to accomplish the same task, covered in this tutorial, and many other resources available out there on the Net. Apparently, YouTube and the various users/programmers who have devised these various solutions are in a bit of a ongoing cat-and-mouse game, with YouTube making changes in their code to foil downloading and saving, and the hackers responding in kind. So, if you're really interested in building up a collection of videos, it may worth the time to investigate and try several methods, or at least bookmark the ones that look most promising.

And if you've already found a video-downloading-and-saving resource that works particularly well, or have additional information on this topic, please feel free to use the comments to share your expertise.

Cross-posted to Heliocentric Worlds.