Grabbing Video from Youtube.

Update: This hack doesn’t work any more. I’ll post the latest pretty soon. Hopefully. 🙂

I loved this performance by Tina & Hussain. It left me breathless, and wet-ted my eyes :D.

I wanted it s badly. Did a l’ill research, found a hack, and here I am, sharing [& open sourcing it 😉 ].
You can find various sites and ‘n’ number of tools to grab your favorite video from Youtube.
There are definitely simpler ways, including a javascript. However, I liked this manual way of doing the job. It let’s me see where’s what… 🙂

1. Goto the page containing the video.
2. View page source. [Ctrl+U in firefox] 3. Search [Ctrl+F] for “player2.swf?“. It’d be something like “/player2.swf?video_id=jksdjs….“.
4. Copy the part after “?“, i.e., “video_id=jksdjs….“.
5. Append it after “www.youtube.com/get_video.php?“. It’d look something like “www.youtube.com/get_video.php?video_id=jksdjs….“.
6. Paste your string in the address bar of your browser and hit enter.
7. Please note that the video that we download is an flv file [and needs “.flv” to be manually added.] 8. If you don’t have an flv player, get it from HERE.

I hope it helps you get what you want I am not sure as to how long it’d work as the YouTube guys do not like people to download the videos and keep changing the settings. [ I am still wondering why!!!] If the above mentioned steps do not help, please leave comments.

Psst.: I am planning to write a script to do it automatically. However, I am not sure if I want to do it in Perl or Java. [Perhaps, I’ll code in perl and ask my students to do it in Java 🙂 ]