Saving Youtube Videos

[Jean-christophe Boulay]

My technique still works perfectly. I don’t use any special software or services, just good ol’ Safari. This will always work for almost any video embedded in a web page.

-Open Safari and go to the page with the video you want.
-Open the Activity window in Safari. This will list all the elements loaded to display the page. If you’ve visited many pages, there will be a disclosure triangle for each of them. Open the one for the page you want to steal video from.
-Find the video among the other elements. It’s usually much much bigger than anything else. Everything will be in kB and you’ll probably have your video only displaying MB.
-Click on that element and command-C.
-Open your Downloads window in Safari and command-V your link in there.
-You’ll start downloading the file. For YouTube, the file will be called “videoplayback.flv”.
-Rename and convert.

Safari is the best browser for this, as the activity reports are so easily accessible compared to other browsers that hide them in developer modes or some such nonsense.

IHTH,

JC Boulay
Technical Director
Audio Z
Montreal, Canada
http://www.audioz.com

[Bill Carruthers]

Jean-Christophe Boulay,

You saved my day today! Thanks so much for the tip!

[Bill Carruthers]

One last question for you… Doing your process works every time for stuff off of youtube, I can’t seem to pull a video from vimeo using the same technique.

Am I doing something wrong, or is there another process when pulling embedded videos from sites other than youtube?

Thanks so much!