Save YouTube Video's

We have uploaded quite a few video’s of Felix on his page. It has been a nice and easy way of sharing some of our moments with him with family and friends elsewhere. However it is pretty bandwidth and data intensive if you have to play the video’s online every-time you want to watch them and I think mum and dad’s 300Mb plan is getting a hammering. So for the interested parties here is a guide to download and play the video’s locally.

To download the video’s directly from YouTube there are a couple of options. You can either paste the URL of the video on a website such as keepvid.com and it will generate a download link for you.

I will try to put up the download links in italics below the video’s from now on – alternatively you can click on the share button in the lower right hand corner of the video player and that will take you to the page of that video.

You click on the link generated by keepvid.com and the file downloads to your computer. 2 minutes video is about 5Mb download (remember this happens in the background anyway when you play it online). Another way to download the video is to use a an extension for FireFow.

When you have the video on your hard-drive you need to rename it to something that makes sense and make sure it has the file extension .flv. The next and last step is to install some software that will allow you to play the .flv files on your computer.

When the video’s are uploaded to YouTube they are trans-coded to Macromedia Flash Video which plays nicely in most peoples browsers, however it does not play on your desktop so you need to download either FLV Player or VLC media players in order to play the downloaded video files. If you want the player to support video formats galore then choose VLC.

Voila! That is it. You now have your own copy of the video’s. Just post me a comment if you cant get it to work.