Techie Titbits

How do I copy/download youtube videos/audios to my own computer with just one click?

Youtube is a great service, no doubt. However you might want more. What if you want those video/audio on your own system? The reasons may be several. You want to access them while offline, or may be your internet connection is slow and the videos don't load smoothly, or you just want your fav things in a single folder. Whatever the reason, here is how you do it.

1> You can use an online service on http://vixy.net/. You can type in the url of the youtube video and download a file of your specified type (avi, mp3, mp4 etc). However due to excess load, the server is often busy. And even when it does covert the file, sometimes the quality is not as good.

2> The other option, which I recommend, is use an add-on of mozilla firefox. Here is a step-by-step guide. Steps 1-4 are one-time. Once set, you can save videos with just one click.

1. If you do not already have Mozilla Firefox. Download and install it from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/
   
2. Install the add-on named 'Fast Video Download' from https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3590
3. Once installed you have to close and restart the mozilla browser. Before you do that, make sure you have the url of this page in the history or otherwise saved to come back to this post.
4. After the installation, you will see icon at the bottom right corner of the browser as shown below.
5. Now go to the video which you want to download. And click this icon. It will ask for the file name and location to save like a normal windows dialogue box. Fill the info and hit 'save'.
6. The file will be saved in .flv format which is a flash format. You can open the downloaded file in an .flv player from http://www.download.com/FLV-Player/3000-2139_4-10467081.html
7. Often you would like to convert the file to other formats eg avi, if you want to retain the video or to mp3, if you want to extract just the audio. This can be easily done too with other free softwares. Read my other post on how to extract audio (mp3) from youtube video.
   

A few notes -
1> If you click the video download icon on a page which does not have an embedded video, you will get an error saying "can't handle this page". Recheck the page you are on and browse to the proper page before hitting the button again.

2> It can used to download videos from other sites too eg video.google.com, metacafe.com, hi5.com, vids.myspace.com, break.com, current.com, dailymotion.com, putfile.com, Streetfire.net, vidiac.com