Club Linux Coffs Harbour

YouTube is great. It provides an easy way for non-technical people to share video clips. The downside is that it does so by streaming the video in a proprietary format. That's bad news for people with low-bandwidth Internet connections, or who want to avoid using proprietary or (depending on local laws) legally grey media players. Wouldn't it be great if you could download videos from YouTube and watch them at your leisure in a friendly file format? Well, you can using a couple of simple command-line tools...

'youtube-dl' is a small Python script which when given a YouTube URL will download and save the Flash movie. For example, to download the Weird Al Yankovic music video "Don't Download This Song":

youtube-dl http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0C93_0L2Z9c

Then to convert it to MPEG1 video, using 'ffmpeg' (You will almost certainly find a version of ffmpeg packaged for your system in your distribution's package repositories.):

ffmpeg -i 0C93_0L2Z9c.flv DontDownload.mpg

And voila! A video that you can watch without buffering interruptions, in your free media player of choice.