Download Youtube Videos in Linux

k As everyone knows Youtube is the largest source of online videos in the world. There are many Youtube Video downloaders available in Windows platform, but most of them don't work or are slow or require you to pay for downloading videos.If you are using a linux based operating system like Ubuntu, It can be difficult to Download youtube Videos. But don't worry, inthis post i present you with various methods by which you can downlaod and save Youtube and other flash videos from your Linux system and save them on your hard drive.

1. Just Watch to Download You Tube Videos for Linux

  Have you ever thought what happens when a Video is buffered completely. It plays seemingly without any hitch even on slow computers. Well what happens is that when a video is buffered on a site like Youtube, a copy of that video is saved in /tmp directory. So after watching the video make sure the you do not close or change the page in the browser. After the video is streamed fully in the browser just move to the /tmp directory and you can find a .flv file with name beginning with Flash*. Just copy that file into your desktop and it’s done. This is not the case with just the youtube videos but any flash videos on net can be downloaded this way. Similarly you can use this trick to download Videos on Windows systems as well

2. Use Command Line to Downlaod you Tube Videos

If are comfortable with using command line, this way is for you. It is easy and effective way to download You tube videos on any Linux running machine.  Youtube-dl is a Python script, which  can run under Linux, Mac OS X, or Windows platforms as long a latest version of python is installed. For installing the script in Ubuntu just type

sudo apt-get install youtube-dl

Now for downloading a youtube video, in the terminal type

youtube-dl  <<video page url>>

For Example the video URL is http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc0CVEuUvRs, type

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yc0CVEuUvRs

There are also a number of options available for you with this python script. You can view this by typing

youtube-dl –help

There are many options for you to play around. For example you can also download Audio from a youtube video

youtube-dl <video URL> --extract-audio

This will extract the audio in best format available. You can also specify your preferred format such as .mp3 as follows:

youtube-dl <video URL> --audio-format mp3

To specify the quality or bit-rate of the audio

youtube-dl <video URL> --audio-quality 256k

3. Grabber websites.

There are many websites like keepvid.com which allow users to download the youtube video by entering the url. This is not the best option to download You tube videos and should be sued only when all othe rmethods have been exhausted. But in many cases I have found this works well, so keep this technique in hand.

4. Firefox plugins

If you are a Mozilla Firefox user there are a number of plugins which automatically detect any flash videos being played in the page. It need not be a ‘you’ tube page. This supports most of the other favourite websites. The below are just a few to name.

1-Click YouTube Video Download

Download Flash and Video

Flash Video Downloader

Fast YouTube Download

You can search for plugins for firefox to download flash videos. Keeping 2-3 plugins help you download from almost any site as all plugins will not work for every site.