I’m preparing to present a keynote at a conference in April. Right now I’m just gathering ideas and resources, but there are several YouTube videos I may be interested in showing.
As any presenter knows, if the Internet’s involved it doesn’t pay to rely on being able to go online — it’s best to have offline copies of resources, just in case.
[I remember running one training session a few years ago, about how to use the Internet, where the connection died at the beginning of the session, with no hope of getting it back up and running that day …]
As part of my gathering and thinking I decided to store a copy of the interesting YouTube videos on my own Mac. After some searching I discovered this particularly useful technique:
you can get the FLV that is being played without additional software, by playing a video in Safari with the Activity window open. You should see one entry that is increasing in size, up to some number of megabytes. Option-double click on that entry, and the FLV will download.
Once you have it you cannot play it in the latest Flash Player, that only plays swfs, and this is an FLV. If you install the Perian components (http://www.perian.org/) you can then play the FLV in QuickTime Player.
You may need to rename the file that gets downloaded. Just call it what you like, with .flv at the end.
[Via : Apple - Support - Discussions - video capture ....]
I’ve found the Option double-click technique works well. Then I rename the downloaded file. It plays just fine in VLC.
KnowIT by RSS
I’ve found that a bit easier than digging through the Activity Window is to copy the URL of the YouTube page (or the URL from many other supported Flash video providers) and paste it into the engine at http://www.keepvid.com – This service finds the FLV for you and provides a download link. The advantage here is that you can (at least in Safari 3, not sure about older versions) right-click the download link and select Save Linked File As… which lets you download and rename it all at the same time.
Also, in addition to installing Perian tools to be able to play the FLVs in Quicktime, you can install a plug-in to play the FLVs in Leopard’s Quick Look. It’s tough to be sure because the page is in an Asian language, but it appears Perian must be installed for this plug-in to work. http://homepage.mac.com/xdd/software/flv/
Take YouTube Videos with you
YouTubeRobot.com today announces YouTube Robot 2.0, a tool that enables you to download video from YouTube.com onto your PC, convert it to various formats to watch it when you are on the road on mobile devices like mobile phone, iPod, iPhone, Pocket PC, PSP, or Zune.
YouTube Robot allows you to search for videos using keywords or browse video by category, author, channel, language, tags, etc. When you find something noteworthy, you can preview the video right in YouTube Robot and then download it onto the hard disk drive. The speed, at which you will be downloading, is very high: up to 5 times faster than other software when you download a single file and up to 4 times faster when you download multiple files at a time.
Manual download is not the only option with YouTube Robot. You may as well schedule the download and conversion tasks to be executed automatically, even when you are not around. Downloading is followed by conversion to the format of your choice and uploading videos to a mobile device (if needed). For example, you can plug in iPod, select the video, go to bed, and when you wake up next morning, your iPod will be ready to play new YouTube videos.
Product page: http://www.youtuberobot.com
Direct download link: http://www.youtuberobot.com/download/utuberobot.exe
Company web-site: http://www.youtuberobot.com
E-mail: support@youtuberobot.com
Great tip. Thanks a lot! Now I can have my favoriate videos locally on my laptop.
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