Download a Video
Have you ever wanted to download a YouTube video?
Needless to say, there are more than a few considerations.
First, there's the legality. That's a bit of a knotty problem. YouTube takes the position that it's the responsibility of uploaders to only share legal material, that is to say, non-copyright material. Thus, if we are to assume that only copyright free material has been uploaded, there's nothing wrong with downloading it.
Of course, that's not the case. But the other oddity is that while some copyright holders don't like the idea of their material being shared (usually just bits and pieces of it), others have no problem with it, feeling that "any press is good press."
On the other hand, there is plenty of material on YouTube that, while it may be owned by someone, it's not technically a copyright protected piece: a home movie of your kids, for example, that you freely posted.
Not too long ago, for example, I wanted to download a friend's baby crawling, and use it as part of a silly project I was working on. I might have asked her for the clip, of course, but since it was already up on YouTube, why not just download it for instant access?
There are a few steps to doing this, none of them particularly onerous any more, and most of them with free versions of the software required to perform them.
Here's what I do:
First, you'll need to download the video. There are any number of downloaders available, but what almost all of them have in common is the ability to access a video on the Internet, and to convert it (typically on the fly) to a format that you will be able to play at will on your computer. (YouTube makes flash video out of uploaded files, so you'd have to have a flash player to play the downloaded video back - and typically, most of us don't. Flash Player is most often a plugin for your browser, and we don't generally have it as a stand alone application on our machines.)
I use YouTube Downloader, a free application that is very simple, barebones, and works just fine. You can find it here.
Now, you'll need a tool to convert your video. I found that while YouTube Downloader has a "step two" option, allowing you to convert your downloaded file to a more usable format, the quality of the resulting video was not up to par.
So for this step, I use Super. Super is a very powerful conversion tool, that will accept almost any file format, and will convert it to just about any file format (for video files). Don't be scared off by the download site. It looks a bit like you're going to end up in one of those pornographic popup nightmares, but trust me, you won't! It does take a bit of doing to find the link that actually downloads the file, versus the many, many,many links that just take you further into the site. The thing to do is, in IE, right click on one of the download links, and then "Save target" to start the download.
The interface on Super is simple enough - the challenge with video always is to know what format you want to convert to and from. In the case of Super, it doesn't really care what the format of the original is, it merely wants to know how you want to encode it for the converted product. It's not the purpose of this article to go into a lot of discussion of the various formats and their purposes, so I'll just leave it that you make your selections, right click on the "Drop a valid multimedia file here" panel to specify where you want your converted file saved, and click "Encode" to start the operation. It's fast, reliable, and the output product is usually very good.
Needless to say, there are more than a few considerations.
First, there's the legality. That's a bit of a knotty problem. YouTube takes the position that it's the responsibility of uploaders to only share legal material, that is to say, non-copyright material. Thus, if we are to assume that only copyright free material has been uploaded, there's nothing wrong with downloading it.
Of course, that's not the case. But the other oddity is that while some copyright holders don't like the idea of their material being shared (usually just bits and pieces of it), others have no problem with it, feeling that "any press is good press."
On the other hand, there is plenty of material on YouTube that, while it may be owned by someone, it's not technically a copyright protected piece: a home movie of your kids, for example, that you freely posted.
Not too long ago, for example, I wanted to download a friend's baby crawling, and use it as part of a silly project I was working on. I might have asked her for the clip, of course, but since it was already up on YouTube, why not just download it for instant access?
There are a few steps to doing this, none of them particularly onerous any more, and most of them with free versions of the software required to perform them.
Here's what I do:
First, you'll need to download the video. There are any number of downloaders available, but what almost all of them have in common is the ability to access a video on the Internet, and to convert it (typically on the fly) to a format that you will be able to play at will on your computer. (YouTube makes flash video out of uploaded files, so you'd have to have a flash player to play the downloaded video back - and typically, most of us don't. Flash Player is most often a plugin for your browser, and we don't generally have it as a stand alone application on our machines.)
I use YouTube Downloader, a free application that is very simple, barebones, and works just fine. You can find it here.
Now, you'll need a tool to convert your video. I found that while YouTube Downloader has a "step two" option, allowing you to convert your downloaded file to a more usable format, the quality of the resulting video was not up to par.
So for this step, I use Super. Super is a very powerful conversion tool, that will accept almost any file format, and will convert it to just about any file format (for video files). Don't be scared off by the download site. It looks a bit like you're going to end up in one of those pornographic popup nightmares, but trust me, you won't! It does take a bit of doing to find the link that actually downloads the file, versus the many, many,many links that just take you further into the site. The thing to do is, in IE, right click on one of the download links, and then "Save target" to start the download.
The interface on Super is simple enough - the challenge with video always is to know what format you want to convert to and from. In the case of Super, it doesn't really care what the format of the original is, it merely wants to know how you want to encode it for the converted product. It's not the purpose of this article to go into a lot of discussion of the various formats and their purposes, so I'll just leave it that you make your selections, right click on the "Drop a valid multimedia file here" panel to specify where you want your converted file saved, and click "Encode" to start the operation. It's fast, reliable, and the output product is usually very good.
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