Downloading Videos from YouTube & Other sources

Since long I was looking for proper method to download videos from YouTube and other websites showing streaming videos. At last, I found one easy way to download videos from sites like YouTube, Google videos, Bebo, MySpace, SpikedHumor, Apple videos, or any other site:

Required Software : Real Player. (Current version is v11 as on date). You can download latest version of Real Player at http://www.realplayer.com/. It is available in two editions : one RealPlayer Free, the basic edition and second RealPlayer Plus. The Basic free edition is good enough for our need to download videos from web.

Download RealPlayer and install it.  Once installed, this program adds a plug-in for your browsers (Internet Explorer or Firefox) and whenever you are watching a video, just hover over it with you mouse and a "Download This Video"   button will appear on top of the video (like in the image below) . Click on it and select “Save This Video As…” option.

If the button doesn't appear, right click anywhere on the video and choose "Download This Video To RealPlayer" as shown below.

RealPlayer will then start downloading your chosen video and a new window will appear to show the progress, like this:

Once download is complete, you can play the downloaded video by clicking the 'Play' link or from the download folder. (Note: Clicking 'Remove' or 'Clear' button will only delete the video from the download list, not from your computer) By default, RealPlayer downloads all your videos in a folder called "RealPlayer Downloads" inside your "My Documents/My Videos" folder and in some cases in Vista its downloaded at “C:\Users\<username>\Videos\RealPlayer Downloads”

That's it, you have downloaded your video! The videos downloaded from YouTube are in .flv format. Real Player supports this as well as wide verities of audio and video formats.

If you wish to convert downloaded items into another formats, visit my post “Changing Audio & Video Formats”.