EDIT: It appears KeepVid is Back!
Sometimes you want to download something from YouTube and hang on to it. Not because you’re interested in violating copyright or overthrowing The Man or anything like that, but because you’re worried that it will go away or that you’ll want to look at it somewhere where the Internet access is dodgy.
Anyway, when I was in that situation my go-to site was KeepVid. And now it appears KeepVid is no more. When you go to KeepVid.com you get something that looks like this:
I went and checked the domain registration for KeepVid at Whois.sc and apparently the domain information changed today, so this is really recent.
According to the same registration information, the domain doesn’t expire until March 2018, so I don’t think this is a case of forgotten renewal. Is it that KeepVid has finally folded to threats of legal action? The KeepVid Twitter account hasn’t been updated in well over a year, and the Facebook page not since January 2015.
Anybody out there know what happened? Any thoughts about alternatives to KeepVid?
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I use the FireFox extension Video DownloadHelper.
http://www.downloadhelper.net/
KeepVid was okay (was it the one that needed Java?) I recently got a YouTube demerit badge for having a 4 year old screencast showing my media class students how to use it and PwnYouTube
My current pref is http://save from.net which like the one mentioned in the previous comment, adds a download button to any YT page or even an embedded video.
It’s always seemed fishy why YT even allows this to be done sideways. And why do they not provide their own download button on videos licensed under Creative Commons?
No java was neded
Because the Flash player has never been supported on the iPhone, most video sites have to compensate by serving up conventionally formatted video to an iPhone browser. Usually I’ve found this means you get a nice compatible MP4 file sent to you. So often downloading a video is as simple as using the “Developer” menu of your browser to tell it to tell the server you are browsing from Safari on an iPhone, and the site will nicely serve you up an MP4 file you can save. Indeed, I think in some cases this is exactly what KeepVid would do to get you the download link – though it may have handled some difficult edge cases that this method won’t as well.
Wow, great suggestions, especially Tim Farley, thanks for that. I want to preserve my grandfather
s performance in the 1950’s with the Toledo symphony, playing a Brahms concerto. The recording was (amazingly, in 1952??) made surreptitiously by a fan who must have smuggled an Ampex recorder and somehow powered it. Portable tape decks were not too common then…
Try http://en.savefrom.net/1-how-to-download-youtube-video/ and http://downloadyoutubevideo.org/
Both worked for me a few minutes ago
Dan
The command line tool youtube-dl is my go-to here. It’s regularly updated (since YouTube keeps fooling with the layout of its pages to try to defeat this sort of thing), and handles a variety of other sites (Vimeo, etc.) as well. It can scrape the video out of almost any page in which some is embedded, and it integrates nicely with ffmpeg to allow you to export stuff in your preferred formats, snag audio-only, etc.
clipconverter website worksd, but it has too many ads..I turn to 5kplayer and it works great. it’s free and clean, no ads. I think it’s more stable than online sites cause i don’t need to worry about the site’s down. It’s a good alternative. http://www.5kplayer.com