Viewing YouTube movies offline
The drawback of movies on the web is that they are only available for online viewing. For many reasons, you might want to download a movie – perhaps because your connection is not good enough for smooth playback, or you want to archive a video, or you want to view it where you won't have Internet access. Several small programs can download web movies – and sometimes even convert them to another format.
Programs such as 4K Video Downloader, cclive, ClipGrab, get-flash-videos, Minitube, xVideoServiceThief, and youtube-dl can help (but see the "Warning" box). These tools appear to YouTube like a normal user, which allows you to save the streaming output to a file on your hard disk.
4K Video Downloader, ClipGrab, Minitube, and xVideoServiceThief offer graphical user interfaces. In contrast, cclive, get-flash-videos, and youtube-dl are programs for the command line, meaning a tougher learning curve while you learn the cryptic parameters. On the upside, however, you can embed the tools in shell scripts. A quick overview of the most important functions is provided in Table 1.
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