Direct YouTube Videos to MP4 Files

Dec 9, 2008 by d0rr    1 Comment     Posted under: Blog

Are you a fan of the most popular video sharing portal – YouTube? Always wanted to put YouTube videos onto your iPod, PSP, NDS? Have been trying hard to (illegally) get a free video format converter and eventually got infected by trojan horses and viruses? Fred no more as you now have an easy and hassle free way of saving MP4 video files straight from YouTube website!

If you are techie enough, you simply need to add an additional parameter onto the URL “fmt=18″ if you already know how to download YouTube video directly as FLV files. But what we aim for here is simplicity. None of us want to spend time keying in the URL manually one by one, we all fancy drag and drop or right click and save kind of UI.

There may be some other options (better ones, maybe) out there, but I’m sharing one of those methods that works great for me.

Here is how it goes.

Save the following link as a bookmarklet by dragging it to your Links bar (in Firefox, Safari) or right-clicking and adding it to your favorites (in Internet Explorer, Opera):

When you are at any video page on YouTube website and would want to download the video as MP4, simply click on the bookmarklet that you’ve added just now. You will see that there is an extra line of copy and link being added as follow:

You may click on the “Download as MP4″ link to download the video as MP4 file. Alternatively if that does not work, right click on the link “Download as MP4″ and select “Save Link As”.

For your additional information, YouTube’s MP4 files have a higher resolution, stereo sound and can be played with applications like VLC, MPlayer, iTunes, QuickTime. Not all YouTube videos can be downloaded as MP4 files though. Usually a 10 minutes YouTube video in MP4 format will cost around 40MB.

Do note that according to YouTube’s Terms of Use, you are required “not to access User Submissions or YouTube Content through any technology or means other than the video playback pages of the Website itself, the YouTube Embeddable Player, or other explicitly authorized means YouTube may designate”.

Please follow the steps on your own risk. This website is not going to be responsible on any circumstances caused by following the tips and tricks on this page.

Got anything to say? Go ahead and leave a comment!