How to download videos from YouTube

Although there are some tools available that allow you to grab videos from YouTube to your local storage, I rely on this plain method (rarely, though):

1. Load the video’s YouTube URL like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIDEOID in your web browser.
2. Look at the HTML source code and search for the string “video_id”. The video ID in the URL matches the string that follows.
3. Scroll a bit to the right to the string “t” and copy the lengthy string that follows.
4. Compose the download URL: http://youtube.com/get_video.php?video_id=VIDEOID&t=TSTRING
5. Put this URL into your download manager. If using wget, put the URL into quotes; you might want to add -O nicefilename.flv.