How to Download a YouTube Video

download youtube video Why one may need to download a YouTube video? Each of us has his own answer. Some wants to save the video before it is deleted, or to watch the video on his 50" HD TV, or, on the contrary, to watch it on a small screen of his iPod. Others have too slow Internet connection, or corporate policy prohibits them to visit such websites. Finally, many of us merely want to have a collection of our favorite video stored at our hard drives.

Fortunately, there are many tools to download a video from YouTube and convert it to formats other than FLV. It may be difficult to choose a certain solution, so we have spent time and selected the most quality products and services to download videos from YouTube at our opinion.

But before we start the review, let us remind you that YouTube's Terms of Service do not allow any software or hardware solutions to download materials located at the website. This means, all of the below tools break Terms of Service, and by using these tools you are doing this at your own risk.

Web-services to download a video from YouTube

1. KeepVid

It is simple and obvious. You need to copy a link to the page containing a video, paste to the UTL field and click the Download button. This service requires Java plugin for your browser, and it works not that fast.

2. BenderConverter

This is a great web-service to download and convert video files, not only from YouTube. There is no much advertising there, it works fast and doesn't require any additional modules, because downloading and converting happen on the server side.

Software to download a video from YouTube

1. MediaVigor YouTube Downloader (Windows)

A small, but very nimble utility. It supports a wide variety of formats including HD video and MP3, it downloads and converts in a multi-thread mode, and is indeed very easy to use.

2. TubeTV (Mac OS)

To use this program you need to download and install Perian extension. The tool works stable, it is free and very easy to use.

3. YouTube Ripper (Linux)

This is a script, and it really works. It saves video in the source format only - FLV.

Of course, this is not the entire list; we simply named the most popular solutions, excluding paid ones, those that didn't work at the moment, and those which safety was questionable.

Article: how to download a youtube videos.