If you are an IT professional as I, you would love to live your life digitally and electronically
I like YouTube since I can share my videos with my family and friend from everywhere the world on it. And I also can watch a lot of interested videos uploaded from everywhere the world. But sometimes I just want to watch some video offline. So how can I download video from YouTube?
Well, there are a simple way and a complicated way as well.
Simple way:
Go to the website VIXY.NET BETA and you will see a text input field on the top which you can type the YouTube video URL you would like to download, and the website will convert the FLV file on YouTube into MPEG4 or others for you to download to your local machine.
According to the website, it converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.
This service allows you convert a Flash Video / FLV file (YouTube's videos,etc) to MPEG4 (AVI/MOV/MP4/MP3/3GP) file online. It is using a compressed domain transcoder technology (outline in Japanese). It converts FLV to MPEG4 faster and less lossy than a typical transcoder.
When you submit an url, it will download and convert to the video format. Then you can download the converted file.
FLV to MPEG4 Conveter engine is now OpenSource. You can download the source code via subversion: http://sourceforge.net/svn/?group_id=183657
I tried and I successfully downloaded a video from YouTube. But I got problem with other video services, like Sina Vblog etc. I always got a error message from VIXY ".... your YouTube is down?" when I submitted other non-YouTube URL. In this case, I suggest you use the following way.
Complicated way:
As I tried to download videos from other non-YouTube sites, I believe this way will work for YouTube site too. [Updated 7/10/2007, I wrote a Chinese blog about the way too http://weblog.lichao.net/articles/software/30.html]
If you are use IE to watch videos on YouTube (I use IE 7 as the example, so the menu options will be slim different on IE 6 or 5)
- Watch the full length of this video you would like to download.
- Then go to Internet Options of your browser's top menu Tools.
- In Browser History section, click Settings to open Temporary Internet files dialog window.
- Click View Files from this window and you will be re-directed to the folder of D:\Documents and Settings\{yourname}\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files.
- Find any files with extension of .flv (Flash Video File) , and copy out to your other folders.
- Either to modify this file (like use Macromedia to create a new .swf file by import this .flv file) or download some flash video player software to open it.
Good luck to you all!
