Download YouTube Video

08 Apr 2009

I deal with a fair few academics and if there’s one thing they love about the Internet and the World Wide Web it’s YouTube and the vast resources it offers. Giving multimedia presentations is obviously a great way of getting people engaged, but an issue is that when visiting an institution you can’t always guarantee that you will have access to the Internet so being able to download a video from YouTube is a huge benefit.

I was asked how to do this recently and I directed the user to a bookmark (/’bookmarklet’) I occasionally use for just such a task. I use it from within Firefox whilst on a YouTube page and then simply click the bookmark on my toolbar to initiate the download. Unfortunately WordPress doesn’t allow me to embed the Javascript for the bookmark directly into a link in this post, so you’ll either have to copy and paste the following into your bookmark location/URL…

javascript:if(document.location.href.match(/http:\/\/[a-zA-Z\.]*youtube\.com\/watch/)){document.location.href='http://www.youtube.com/get_video?fmt='+(isHDAvailable?'22':'18')+'&video_id='+swfArgs['video_id']+'&t='+swfArgs['t']}

… or visit the original source for this little gem, as the credit for the bokmark wizardry goes to a post on the Google Operating System blog.

I would urge anyone using this to pay attention to the terms and conditions of use of YouTube and at the very least credit YouTube and whoever created the original content in whatever academic presentation it might be used in.

Author: Stephen Millard

Tags: | web | javascript |

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Download YouTube Video

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