1. Save YouTube Videos To Your Hard Drive
YouTube and other video sharing sites provide endless hours of wholesome, time-
wasting entertainment. But what if you want to watch movies without the browser?
There's no direct or easy way to download YouTube videos from the site, but
thankfully there are ways to make a local copy for personal use. A number of tools
exist to save youtube videos for playback on your computer, iPod, iPhone, PSP and
even your boring old DVD player.
Using Firefox
The easiest solution if you're a Firefox user is to install the Download Helper add-on.
Download Helper can handle much more than just YouTube -- in fact the add-on can
grab just about any media file from nearly any source and download it to your
machine. There are also a couple of other Firefox plugins, notably Video Downloader,
though the latest YouTube site update seems to be interfering with Video
Downloader's ability to grab video for some users.
Using Other Desktop Software
If you're not a Firefox user, don't worry, there's some other options. My Video
Downloader is a Windows program that will download movies from YouTube, though
it will set you back $30 (there's a free trial that allows for 10 downloads so you can
test it).
Mac users looking to go from YouTube straight over to your video iPod or AppleTV
have a couple options. There's Podtube 2 which will download and convert files from
YouTube, Daily Motion and MySpace. PodTube 2 is $5. TubeSock 2.0 offers similar
features, though it only handles YouTube videos, and costs $15.
The latest RealPlayer (version 11, a beta release, is $30 and supports Windows XP
and Vista only) has the ability to download and burn videos clips from YouTube and
other sites like Google Video and MySpace Video. The player will automatically add
a "Download" link button to video pages in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once
downloaded, you can use the player to watch the videos or burn them to a DVD.
Although it hasn't been updated in a while, there's Tubular, which looks a bit like
iTunes applied to YouTube. It's for Mac users only.
And finally, the most primitive -- but definitely free and working -- method is to use
SaveTube.com. Just paste in the YouTube URL and SaveTube will find the cached file
and give you a download link. Here is a collection of some other free youtube video
downloader to save youtube videos.

2. What to Do With Your Downloaded Video
Unless you're using one of the all-in-one solutions listed above, once you've pulled
down the Flash FLV file from YouTube or another video sharing site, you'll need to
convert it to another format for viewing in QuickTime (which includes iTunes and
AppleTV), Windows Media Player or on a portable device.
Alternately, you can just use a FLV-capable media player like the excellent and free
VLC (all platforms) to watch your downloaded FLVs.
Mac users: To convert your FLV file on a Mac you can use mac video converter,
which is free though limited to output in MP4. You can also use the aforementioned
TubeSock.
Windows users: There's Super, which is free, or Zillatube, which costs $30. Both
support a wide range of output options.
Mac and Windows users can also try MPEG Streamclip, though Windows folks will
need to download the Windows version of Apple QuickTime, which is also free.
Linux users: You can turn to ffmpeg (which also works on OS X and Windows).
You'll need a little command line juice, but this conversion script should get you
started:
ffmpeg -i myFile.flv -ab 56 -ar 22050 -b 500 -s 320×240 myFile.mpg
And there you have it, now you can watch your YouTube favorites anywhere you'd
like in nearly any video format you can name.