Did you know that you don’t necessarily need flash to view YouTube videos? You don’t actually need to even visit YouTube to be able to watch a cool video that a friend gave you a link to.
All you need is youtube-dl, a neat program written and actively maintained by Ricardo Garcia Gonzalez which allows you to download a YouTube video directly as a .flv file which can be played with mplayer or VLC.
Just follow these few simple steps to download your first video.
- Download youtube-install script
- Make the install script executable:
chmod +x ./youtube-install.sh - Run the youtube-install script in the terminal as a superuser:
sudo ./youtube-install.sh - If the script installed successfully you can now start downloading YouTube videos like this:
youtube-dl URL, where “URL” is your YouTube video URL.
The video file will be downloaded in the current working directory.
For more information about youtube-dl check the official page on github. For other ways to download YouTube videos see below.
Other ways to download youtube videos
KeepVid.com
A great alternative to the youtube-dl script is KeepVid.com which allows you to drop the video URL, select the video site it is from (yes it supports even more than YouTube) and just click download. Most files will have an ugly file name, but you can rename it to something.flv. VLC will play them fine!
Chrome Add-On
If you use Chrome (or Chromium) install the Elite YouTube Downloader add-on and you’ll get a neat download button (with a drop down menu for options) below every youtube video.