Jalaj P. Jha

Youtube contains thousands of videos to watch, but your internet connection may not be fast enough to buffer and play in real-time and you will encounter frequent breaks in video. In such a case you may like to download the video and they view it offline in one go at your liesure. This will also enable to you view video as many times as you like.

If you too want to Download Youtube Videos to view offline then let’s get started with what you will require.

Video Player Supporting FLV file

The video files from Youtube when downloaded have .FLV (FLash Video) extension. Your current Media player may not be capable of playing these files. So here is a Media Player that I recommend you to download.

VLC Media Player can turn out be your first choice for playing all types of video files be it .MPG, .MP3, .RM, .FLV etc. It’s a free Open Source software and I find many of features missing from popular media payers as adjusting aspect ratio for full screen display etc. Unavailbility of a help file in the standard distribution hides from you many of its fetures but you should get it to experiance it yourself. For example I could play a .AVI file encoded with XVid codec on this player without any seperate download of the codec, whereas all the existing players installed on my system failed to play that movie, until I seperately downloaded the code and installed it.

URL of the file that you want to download

Surprised to see this requirement? but it’s true as you cannot just casually find the url of the video.

A typical url of the page you are visiting on youtube may look like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaD0-NeEWXA When you visit the page the flash player on the page downloads the video, the URL of which it determines/calculate from within the player and is not visible in the page or its source.

The easiest way to find the url with no additional downloads/installation would be to visit this page from Techcrunch, where you can paste the page url to get the url of the video file. Paste the url that you get into the address bar of your browser or the download software you use and you will get going with the file download. If the downloaded file doesn’t have .FLV extension then append it to the file name

Once the file is downloaded you can view it at your own time offline and as many time as you like.

Alternate way for Video file download

If you are a firefox user installing DownloadHelper Addon will save you from hassles determining url, initiate download and appending .FLV extension. Once you have installed the addon (Firefox requires to be restarted after you have done it) a small icon gets added to the side of address bar and as soon as you have visited a youtube video page, the icon animates indicating that it received the video url. Clicking besides the icon pushes a dropdown list from which you can select the .FLV file to be downloaded which will be downloaded one at a time.

So starting with offline viewing ?