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YouTube and other video sharing sites provide endless hours of wholesome, time-wasting entertainment, but what if you want to watch movies without the browser? There's no easy way to download YouTube videos from the site, but thankfully there are other ways to do it.
The best and easiest solution is to use the Firefox plugin <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3006">Download Helper</a>. Download Helper can handle much more than just YouTube, in fact the add-on can grab just about any media file from nearly any source and download it to your machine. There are also a couple of other Firefox plugins, notably <a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2390">Video Downloader</a>, though the latest YouTube update seems to have broken most of them.
If you're not a Firefox user, don't worry, there's some other options. <a href="http://myvideodownloader.com/tryitnow.html">My Video Downloader</a> is a Windows program that will download movies from YouTube, though it will set you back $30 (there's a free trial that allows for 10 downloads).
Mac users looking to go from YouTube straight over to your video iPod or AppleTV have a couple options. There's <a href="http://djodjodesign.free.fr/podtube.html">Podtube 2</a> which will download and convert files from YouTube, Daily Motion and MySpace. PodTube 2 is $5. <a href="http://stinkbot.com/Tubesock/index.html">TubeSock 2.0</a> offer similar features, though it only handles YouTube videos, and costs $15.
Although it hasn't been released yet, there's also a lot of talk surrounding <a href="http://tubularapp.com/blog/">Tubular</a> which looks a bit like iTunes applied to YouTube. Look for Tubular to enter the public beta phase later this year.
And finally, the most primitive, but definitely free and working, method is to use <a href="http://www.savetube.com/">SaveTube.com</a>. Just paste in the YouTube URL and SaveTube will find the cached file and give you a download link.
What to do with your downloaded video
Unless you're using one of the all-in-one solutions listed above, once you've pulled down the Flash FLV file from YouTube, or other video sharing site, you'll need to convert it to another format for viewing in QuickTime (which includes iTunes and AppleTV) or Windows Media Player.
Alternately you can just use an FLV capable media player like the excellent and free <a href="http://www.videolan.org/vlc/">VLC</a> (all platforms).
To convert your FLV file on a Mac you can use <a href="http://www.isquint.org/">iSquint</a>, which is free though limited to output in MP4, or through the aforementioned TubeSock. For Windows folks there's <a href="http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html">Super</a>, which is free, or <a href="http://www.zillatube.com/">Zillatube</a>, which costs $30. Both support a wide range of output options.
Linux users can turn to <a href="http://ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu/">ffmpeg</a> (which also works on OS X and Windows) and a little command line juice, this should get you started:
ffmpeg -i myFile.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320×240 myFile.mpg
And there you have it, now you can watch your YouTube favorites anywhere you'd like in nearly any video format you can name.
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