Downloading and Saving Youtube and Other Streaming Videos

Posted on: September 21st, 2009

Youtube and other video hosting sites are excellent sources of entertainment and study. Sometimes you might want to save one or more of the videos that you encounter.

For some reason, these video sites does just give you a button to download the videos. But fortunately there are numerous solutions and little software applications that can help you with this task. They don’t all work on all sites but they will on the most popular ones.

I just recently found one that might not be the most comprehensive, in regards to the number of sites supported but I found it quite simple to use. It’s a website that facilitates the download process. The address is: http://keepvid.com/

It works like most of the video download solutions: you’d need to copy and paste the complete address of the video you are watching. For example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4myfd3HeQk – This is a video of one of our cats playing on the soccer table we posted on YouTube. They call the website address as `URL` which stands for Universal Resource Locator – it encompassed website addresses and more but for the purpose of downloading videos `URL` equals `website address`.

There are two neat things about this website:

It has a little button that you can drag onto your links toolbar and then after that if you want to download a video you can just click on the button on the links toolbar while on the video’s page – no copy and paste, switching windows, etc.
For Firefox users: the links toolbar is there by default right under the address and search boxes. In Internet Explorer it’s usually not shown. There you’d need to go to View -> Toolbars -> Links Toolbar to have it turned on. You might also need to unlock the toolbars if the the links toolbar pushed too far out, and move it where you can access the links on it.
It offers a higher quality download of YouTube videos. As you probably noticed the online videos are not of the best quality, for storage and bandwidth saving purposes. But at least you’d get a bit better quality on your downloaded file.

What if I have trouble playing the downloaded files?

This just means you don’t have the software installed on your computer that can play that particular type of file, or the encoding in it.

One good solution I know to this is to download and use the VLC media player. It’s a free media player which plays almost anything, from DVDs to obscure format files. You can download it from: http://filehippo.com/download_vlc/