2.27.2007

A Simple Method to Save FLV from YouTube & Convert to AVI on Mac OSX

Open up Youtube and find the video you want to download. Don't bother waiting for it to load, just press apple-option-A or go to Window->Activity in the menubar. Click the arrows to collapse the actiivty from any other open tabs. Double click the line highlighted below, the line with get_video in the URL.





Once this file has completed downloading you are free to convert it to whatever type you wish. The best way to do this, though sometimes problematic, is to use FFMpegX.

Simply drop the get_video download onto the source and it will automatically select divx avi as the output. Don't forget to change the file extension and save directory to .avi.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

http://www.google.com/search?q=download+youtube

Thanatos said...

I realize that there is plenty of software and there are methods available if you search on google. This is one that I like because it doesn't require any software to download the flv file and ffmpegx can convert to many, many different types of video.

Anonymous said...

If you happen to have a Terminal.app window open, you may also download the file to the current directory like so:

curl http://...get_video... -o named.flv

(Could we also get the get_video url from the command-line btw?)

Converting the downloaded file may be useful but is not a must (cf. http://mac.eltima.com/freeflashplayer.html)

Anyway, nice useful tip. Thanks!