Edit—the next day. OH MY EFFING GOD. I AM DUMB. You can just do the last step (look in the activity window for Safari) on the actual YouTube page. No looking at source or anything. Just download the thing that says “get_video” in it (it will probably be on top). kjlhafdsdlhkjadfflkjhfdsalkhjhadlfkhjalsdkfjh I wish I could think clearly.

Just as a disclaimer, this is probably against YouTube’s terms of service (like 4C perhaps), and also probably violates copyright laws (what doesn’t these days?), so this should be used for educational purposes only, and not to steal money from the poor defenseless Google. Actually… find a clip of The Daily Show on YouTube and download that. Then you’re really screwed . P.S. I never actually did what I describe here… it came to me in a dream. And I don’t have any money. Don’t sue me. (Hire me.)

My brother asked me today how to download a video from YouTube. I like breaking things, so I spent time on this instead of homework. Electric flux isn’t that important anyway.

Ok… this is really long and complicated. You’ll need Safari to do it easily (or another browser that lets you see what exactly it’s doing).

Open a new text document (for pasting things). Go to a youtube video’s page and view its source. In Safari the command to do this is alt + command + U (or go to the View menu and click “View Source”). Search for t:’ (t-colon-singlequote). You’ll find something like this:

var swfArgs = {hl:’en’,BASE_YT_URL:’http://youtube.com/’,video_id:’K7aFXRAW7mg’,l:’190’,t:’OEgsToPDskLXcWOXRN-4kxDyWcfE6TfD’,sk:’1PWV80QF3WGWFfqMqPdwzwR’};

The first string you want is the one after video_id. In this case it’s K7aFXRAW7mg. Don’t include the colon or the single quotes. Copy this string and paste it into your text document.

The second string you want is after the t:’—in this case it’s OEgsToPDskLXcWOXRN-4kxDyWcfE6TfD. Don’t include the single quote after it. Copy this string and paste it on a new line in your text document.

Now copy those two strings into this new string:

http://youtube.com/player2.swf?video_id=xxxxxxx&t=xxxxxxxxxx

In our example case this will be:

http://youtube.com/player2.swf?video_id=K7aFXRAW7mg&t=OEgsToPDskLXcWOXRN-4kxDyWcfE6TfD

Go to Safari and open the Activity window (alt + command + A or Window -> Activity). Copy the URL you’ve just created into the location bar (and hit enter). You’ll see the video you want fill the screen and start downloading/playing. In the activity window you should see something that’s downloading at the same rate as the video. It will be easier to find if the URL you pasted is the only site you’re currently visiting. The “Address” of the downloading object should have the words “video_id” and “ash” somewhere in it, and it should be the only thing larger than 100 KB (in “Status”).

Double click this line. A window will open and it will look like nothing is happening, but you’ve actually just downloaded a file (you can check the downloads window: alt + command + L or Window -> Downloads). The default is for this file to save to your Desktop… so go there or browse to wherever it is. The file is called “get_video” and doesn’t have an extension. Rename it to whatever you want, and add a .flv extension to the end. Confirm that yes, you actually want to add that extension. You now have a playable flv file. If you don’t want an flv file search Google for “flv convert.”

...or you could just go to videodl.org and have it do all this for you, but why do it the easy way? :)

edit: wow ok, now that I look, there are a lot of ways to download videos from YouTube, all of which are easier than this. But I couldn’t find anything that explicitly said what those “magic” programs were doing. Here that is.