Keep The You, Lose The Tube...

Well, it was requested to explain how I save YouTube videos, so here goes. It’s fairly simple, but I may not explain it right, so good luck – I was never a good ‘teacher’ :) First, go to YouTube and find a video you like and play it. The red bar at the bottom of the vid shows when it has fully downloaded. Don’t transfer away from this page or load another video until you’ve ‘saved’ it. To do that, go to your Temporary Internet Files folder on your hard drive. If you use IE6 and Windows XP, it’ll be under your ‘Documents & Settings’ folder, under your user name folder, under the Local Settings folder, and then you’ll find the Temporary Internet Files folder. Sort this folder by “Date Checked” and look for a very recent file with the proper size (a 3 minute vid can be around 10 megs) with a name like “get_video?video_id=Idiox0-vdHag” or something like that. Just look for the “get_video” part of it. Copy and paste that file to another folder. When you copy it over, you’ll see a file named something like “get_video[1]”. RENAME this file to what you want to call it and add the extension “.flv” (for example, rename it to MyVideo.flv). You have now successfully saved the file. To watch it now, you’ll just need a FLV Player – a Flash video player. There are free ones out there around the web, but one I found that I liked can be found here thanks to martijndevisser.com. It’s a good little player. Now you can save and watch YouTube videos anytime you want. Or for that matter, most Macromedia Flash 8 video files you find on the web. It doesn’t always work, but it seems to click about 99% of the time. I have a whole folder filled with saved FLV files on my harddrive. In another post, I’ll have to explain how I convert these to MPG files. You lose quality, but they’re more usable…