Did you ever face that dilemma? You wanted to show a video to an upcoming Perspectives class or to a Sunday School class… but you just weren’t sure you’d have access to the Internet in that environment. So ideally, you’d like to “harvest” the video off YouTube to some format that would play on your laptop solo — sort of like a DVD does, but from your hard drive instead. But you go to the YouTube page and… there really doesn’t appear to be any capability for that.
Well I faced that this past week with several YouTube videos I wanted to use when teaching Perspectives. I asked our I.T. guy for his favorite tool, because — honestly — every time I figure this out, it’s 6 months before I have to use it again and I forget! :-) He suggested a download service from dvdvideosoft.com. It didn’t work correctly on my browser/PC, for whatever reason. (He’s a Mac guy, so that might have been it.) But their free iPod converter seemed to do the trick flawlessly. (Play with the settings until it works for you.)
http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-to-iPod-Converter.htm
This URL will “wrap”.. so if you have trouble reassembling it, just go to the Brigada webpage and click on the link we’ll provide you there. Snag that free program, convert the YouTube video to an iPod-compatible video, make sure you have QuickTime from Apple (I know; it was with great fear and trembling that I installed it again. Just make sure you uncheck the boxes that add free things that you don’t want), and you’re in business. The videos played at a fairly high level resolution *and* I didn’t have to worry about bandwidth stall-outs or connectivity in general. Good luck!
Thanks for your info regarding down loading
YouTube stuff.
I have found an easier way which works for me every time I need a clip for a Power Point or a presentation.
There is an online converter where you type in the URL of the clip you want to download and out comes a format that you can use in your PPP
http://vixy.net/
The free Orbit Downloader program does this very well and provides integration with Firefox or Internet Explorer as an Add On that allows you to grab almost any media file with a click or two. It includes a way to get past the anti-leeching technology that some sites are using. Once you’ve downloaded, most files are flashplayer files so you need to install a player that will play .flv format. VHS media player works well for this and is a free download.
Simply find the YouTube video you want, & then change the youtube.com part of the URL to pwnyoutube.com & then you’ll get download options in various formats.
I use the 1-Click YouTube Video Downloader add-on in Firefox. Under the video window, several buttons will show up that allow you to save the video in several formats, flv, mp4, 3gp, etc.
I use Mozilla Firefox as a browser. It’s got a download facility where one can download You-tube, pictures and a number other valuable staff from the internet.
After download I use VLC or FLC media player to play it back. ( Also free software that you can download.) But I found that many of the You-tube clips I can also play with Windows Multimedia Media.
Just copy & paste the .flv file out of the IE cache directory, then play it back any time with VLC.
TJ hit it on the (cheapest) head. In the various versions of Windows, find your “Temporary Internet Files” directory and your downloads are there in date/time sequence. They can be copied but not moved to another directory and played back using the free VLC player. In Win7, the location is “C Drive/Users/(computer name)/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/Temporary Internet Files. In other words, they are well buried but they are available for free.
If you play the video in a recent version of Real Player, it will give you the option of downloading the video.
Great tips.
Wonder what will work for video clips that aren’t from Youtube?
As someone else said, I use Real Player 11, and it does a fine job downloading the YouTube videos to my computer.
Good stuff. My only response is to beware of all the 3rd party items — buyer beware — because some reportedly carry trojan worms with them.
Great instruction over here! Thanks a lot for this post, I always face this problem when you can not download YouTube videos for some reason and I very glad you showed the way to solve it!