How to download YouTube Videos

Unless you’ve been living in some sort of broadband starved haze, you know what YouTube is. Some call it a social networking web site and I guess it is in a way, but at its core, it’s a video sharing tool. It has video clips relating to almost any topic and you can put your own on there as well - videos of movie clips, television clips, music videos, video contents, animation videos, footage of public events, personal recordings of friends, amateur video blogs and comments and more. With the exception of content that is offensive or illegal, you can post virtually anything. The best thing about it, is that it is free!

YouTube, which was started by three former PayPal employees, came into existence in 2005 before being snapped up by Google in 2006. Since then it’s become nothing less than an Internet phenomenon.

There’s a whole lot of things you can do on YouTube – it’s not just for watching videos. You can post videos, tag videos, post comments in a threaded discussion format, search for content by keyword or category and create and participate in discussion groups. You can also use YouTube to collaborate with several blogging applications. Plus you can view profiles of individuals who have posted or commented on videos - see their favorite videos and make contact them. This is why the site gets labeled under the social networking umbrella.

If you are an unregistered user, you can watch the videos, but that’s about all. In order to fully participate you need to Sign Up. If you already have a Google Account you can Sign In using that username and password.

Sign Up Page

Downloading Videos

Downloading a video from YouTube is essentially a hack. YouTube allows a video with their player to be embedded on other websites but they don't provide a utility to download and save a copy. After all, their users have uploaded a video to their YouTube Channel. They may not necessarily want it on your hard drive as well. But as always – there are ways. A lot of movie studios now upload their trailers to YouTube. If you’ve found a good one and you want to show it to your buddies, you may want to just download it to play later instead of having to find it on YouTube again.
 
There are many ways to download YouTube videos and describing them all would not be practical, so we’ll just focus on a couple of easy options.
 
In order to download a YouTube video and watch it later, you’ll need a video player installed which is up to the task. We’ll show you how with Real Player. Download Real Player from www.real.com and install it in your PC or Mac.
 
FYI: Other software that can be used for viewing the downloaded YouTube videos include GOM Player, gnash, VLC, 4U Download YouTube Video, Orbit YouTube downloader etc.

Go find the video you want to download in YouTube.
 
For n00bs: From the YouTube home page, search for the video by entering the keyword in the Search box. Suggestions (prompts) for the keywords appear in a drop-down box. You can choose from this list or type in what you’re looking for exactly and then click Search.

Keywords for the Video

FYI: Search criteria are determined by the title and tags.
 
After you’ve found the video that you want to download, wait for it to start playing and then right-click on the video and select the option Download This Video to Real Player.

Saving the Video

Or you can also use the link Download This Video option that will appear on the top right corner of the video.

The downloading will then start and the video will be saved in the My Library of your Real Player.

Downloading the Video