My mom is asking me which toolbar she can install that will allow her to download the youtube videos that she wants to keep as a file on her PC to send/show to friends. She knows that I am generally against toolbars unless they serve a much-needed purpose, but she does not want to send links to the videos - she wants the actual file, assuming it is freely available to the public. I don't know which program I should advise to her.

Any suggestions?

You don't even need a toolbar, there are scripts available that can do this. I personally just use keepvid.com. They have a script that you can add to your bookmarks so that when you're on a YouTube page, just click the bookmark and it will take you to a page providing download links for the video (if there's an HD version available it will have the MP4 download link in addition to the lower quality FLV). Nice and easy, and no crap (toolbars) to install.

Doesn't look like that site provides links for 720p HD videos (not sure if that's something she'd want to be able to do or not). But if so, there are other scripts out there that can handle this.

+1 for keepvid.com, it's very flexible and easy, you don't need any scripts or apps to begin with.

Mind you that YouTube uses FLV (Flash Video) for loq quality video and MPEG-4 for high quality video. Only the latter is directly playable in a well configured system, FLVs need to be converted before they are usable. On the other hand the high quality videos tend to be greater in size and many e-mail providers might rule out the file sizes of these files and so prohibit them from being attached.

I suggest you tell your mother to just use links to the videos. Less complex and much quicker. As a small note some videos probably are not allowed to be redistributed so downloading them in the first place is not healthy.

Since I use Firefox, I use the the "DownloadHelper" extension for downloading Youtube videos.

DownloadHelper allows me to pick the version (std flv, sd mp4 or hd mp4) to download.

+1 recommended!!!

+1 for downloadhelper. interface could be better but it gets the job done. FYI the conversion add-on for the add-on puts a watermark on the converted videos.

other than that, or if you don't want to install anything then clipnabber.com works along same lines as keepvid.com

It maybe not as convenient, but I do it the folowing way without needing any additional software:


1. watch the video you like to capture

2. open WINDOWS EXPLORER and then go to ...

3. Go to:
4. If you sort the content by "size", you will find that the biggest files are the videos you have watched.

5. Double click and WMP might playback the video you have just watched on Youtube.

6. If not, you might not have the right codec for WMP. In that case, report back and we shall continue trouble shooting.

that's the point of keepvid.com and clipnabber.com - no software and not inconvenient

Something important not mentioned here is how the mother of the OP wants to send videos to her friends/family. If through e-mail then any YouTube video longer than around seven minutes, if downloaded as a HQ MPEG-4 file, will be filtered out by many e-mail providers. The resulting file is larger than 20MB, which GMail for example has set to be the maximum attachment size. The same video in lower quality FLV format takes only around 6.5MB. The problem with FLV is that it is not directly playable in most systems and will require something like a stand-alone Flash player to be viewable (read: for non-technical people difficult to open). The high quality MPEG-4 version of the video is directly playable in most current systems, because the codec is (in most cases) automatically installed on the system. Why exactly does your mother not want to send YouTube links to her friends/family?

I've seen and heard it that keepvid.com is easy to use and that from my friends who use (abuse?) the service to download music videos onto their iPods... However no matter how easy the downloading process is, uploading speed can vary a lot and the file size might be higher than the e-mail provider allows.

These are all valid points, comments.

I do not know why she wants to send the actual file rather than a link. I'm almost scared to ask (she's non-technical). I will explain the file size issue to her, though it probably will do no good.

I use a FLV Downloader that is found at http://www.flv.com/flvdownloader.html. It is free and works great. It is easy to use if you aren't particularly computer savvy. If she is sending files they might need to use a FLV player which can also be found on that site.

Thanks for your $0.02, but I think he probably found a solution 2.5 years ago

This literally made me laugh out loud.

I'll confess to having done this before as well. That's the beauty of a forum thread.