Seetee's Blog

Download YouTube Vids using Safari = SO EASY!

So in a few days I’m off again on yet another business trip to Asia. This time it’s Shanghai, but then after Shanghai, I’m flying to Taiwan to meet my parents there to visit my sister who is there studying abroad. By the way, check out her and her roommate’s blog ( Stephanie and Christina’s Blog on my links) to see their awesome adventures.

On planes, I’m not a huge movie person. I’m more of a TV person, but even more of a YouTube person. The reason being that my attention span on planes isn’t very long since I always end up wanting to close my eyes after 15 minutes. Recently I’ve found myself even having trouble getting through one movie on an 11 hour flight. Maybe I’m getting old, or maybe it was the screaming babies.

I have an awesome collection of favorite YouTube videos that always make me feel so much better after I watch them so I’m super stoked to be able to carry them around on my ipod/iPhone. This ranges from Stephen Curry’s triple double as a rookie a month or so ago which landed him in the ranks with hall of famers (which I can’t stop watching), cute kittens, Taylor Swift’s Ellen DeGeneres  interviews which are hilarious, Obama writing a fourth grader a note to excuse her from school, and the list goes on.

SO, if you have a Mac, here’s what you do according to Mac OSX hints user marco.trive:

If you’re using Safari, there’s an easy way to download YouTube videos. Open the page with the movie and press Command-Option-A, which shows the Activity window. If you’re also loading other sites, you’ll see a list of them: scroll until you find the YouTube page and click on the arrow to show details about what is being loaded.

You will certainly notice an element whose size is over 0.5MB (most of the time, over 5MB). Double-click on it (even if it is still loading), and Safari will download it. When the download is over, navigate to the file in the Finder (which will probably be called get_video) and add the extension .flv to its name. Now you can play it with VLC or with QuickTime (only if you have Perian installed).

I’m using this method right now and it’s so awesome. Here’s the other trick though. I use a program called Handbrake to then convert the .flv videos to m4v format so that I can upload them onto my iPod and iPhone.

Speaking of digitizing files, one issue with Netflix is that sometimes the DVD comes but I don’t have any time to watch it, but I want to get another one so that I can maximize what I get out of my monthly subscription. Simply so that I can watch it, not for distribution. So I’ll use handbrake and rip the DVD and save it onto my computer to watch later and mail the DVD back. I often do this before I head off on a business trip since most networks don’t let you stream TV shows overseas and I can’t watch TV because I don’t understand the language, so it’s nice to have some things on hand to watch in the hotel room to wind down.