How to Download a YouTube File to a Mac
YouTube is a popular video-sharing and watching website. The videos played on sites like YouTube are what Seth Rosenblatt of CNet.com refers to as "embedded videos," that is, they're videos that are embedded into a website, which you view when you're on-line. But it's possible to download these videos, and then play them offline, or even convert them to different formats. On a Macintosh computer, it's easy to download these videos and convert them with inexpensive software.
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Things You'll Need
- Macintosh
- Safari Web browser
- Internet connection
- Media Player software like RealPlayer 11
Instructions
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Open your Safari web browser to youtube.com (see Resources). Pick a video that interests you, and play it. Loading the video's page, and playing the video makes Safari download the HTML for the page, as well as all the collateral files, like the embedded video.
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Open Safari's "Activity Window" by choosing "Activity" from the "Window" menu. The Activity Window contains headings for each opened page, and shows the download progress of each page's collateral files, like graphics files, and embedded video.
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Find the heading for the YouTube page in the Activities window and locate the entry underneath for the embedded video file. The file will usually be over 0.5 megabytes in size. Wait for the entire file to load.
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Double-click the entry for the embedded video. It will download to your desktop. Pay attention to the "Downloads" window which will open, and show the progress of saving the file. If the file does not end with the ".flv" extension, you will need to add or change the file's extension to ".flv" in the Finder. Your file is downloaded.
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Tips & Warnings
In order to play a downloaded .flv, or "flash video" file, you will need a media player that supports the flv format. Real Networks RealPlayer added .flv support as of version 11. You can also convert .flv files into both .mp4 video files and .mp3 audio files. Wondershare AllMyTube for Mac is a low-cost program which excels at converting from .flv to a variety of formats (see Resources).
