How to Download YouTube Videos

I needed to figure out how to download YouTube videos for an upcoming conference presentation where I wasn't confident that I would be able to have a good enough connection to play the video.

I found that there was a very nice bookmarklet to Download as MP4 Files:

One way is to save the following link as a bookmarklet by dragging it to your Links bar (in Firefox, Safari) or right-clicking and adding it to your favorites (in Internet Explorer, Opera):

Get YouTube video

When you want to download a YouTube video, just click on the bookmarklet.

KeepVid offered both (save as FLV and save as MP4) and a nice bookmarklet as well. I've not tried it, but it appears to work for Google Video, MySpace video and more.

Both of these options give you a very nice MP4 file that works great for my presentation.

Other ways to download YouTube Videos and/or convert them...

To get it in Flash Video Format / FLV - you can use the little tool provided by TechCrunch.

Zamzar appears to offer a lot of options to convert from various sites to various formats. The free version had a limit of 100MB which unfortunately excluded the video I was doing 131MB.

Vixy allows conversion to other formats (AVI, WMV, Quicktime). But I've had more issues with getting it to work.

There are lots of other options out there. I just wanted to capture what worked for me.