I haven't done much with my blog/home page in a few months. Because a lot of the entries are bits I find on YouTube, I was dismayed when I checked in again this morning to find that many of my favorites, instead of playing, brought forth this message: "We're sorry, this video is no longer available." Some of those were real treasures. Now I feel like my "house" has been broken into, and I've been robbed. Of course, I never "owned" any of them. But the loss of each one is a "death" of sorts.

Gone are Bach, Brahms & Rachmaninoff clips, some wonderful Russian choral music, Baryshnikov dancing...

And, as if to say, "Gone but not forgotten," the opening pic of the clips teasingly remain... but don't go anywhere.

Lost forever. Such is YouTube.

You could save your favorites to your hard drive, if you really want to keep them. Then serve the videos from your own server space. If you wanted to, that is.

It's pretty easy to grab the videos, and if you use Safari there are no extra tools or websites necessary.

Could you post an easy Howto to grab youtubes using Safar?

tia

Off to get my flu shot. If you don't hear from me think Andromeda Strain (flopping around like a fish.)

The easiest way to get YouTube videos, IMHO is to install RealPlayer 11 and say yes when the install utility asks if you want to install the RP downloader. That will automatically download all embedded videos, except QT, as .flv files that'll play in RP or VLC. You can use iSquint to translate the file to whatever you want.

Sure Poly...

(Here's a visual tutorial)

Bring up Safari's "Activity" window at anytime by invoking Command + Option + A, or by going to Safari Menus—»Window—»Activity.

Might help to reduce your main browser window's width to perhaps half-to two-thirds of your screen size. Browser to the left, activity window to the right. (you'll see why this makes sense in a minute)

Now go to the video you want on the YouTube site. Try this cool acoustic guitar rendition of Zappa's Canarsie I found yesterday, for example. Commence playing the video, if it isn't already.

Now, if you look at the right side "Status" column of your Activity window you'll see a list denoting file sizes for the things that load onto that page. There should be one you see that will be incrementing in size as the video loads...in the example, it's 7.3 MB, and you see "X.Y of 7.3MB".

This is the video file loading. Double click on that line in the Activity window.

A blank window will open. Safari's "Downloads" dialogue will open showing a progress bar.

'get_video' icon will show up on your desktop or in your downloads folder.

Rename the 'get_video' file to 'xxxxxxx.flv' Make sure to put the '.flv' extension on the end.

You can view this via QuickTime by getting and installing the free and very cool Perian plugin.

Then again, some of us prefer to keep that piece-of-sh¡t company out of the equation.

THANK YOU! I'll try that after I walk the dog.

I suppose, though, that it's too much to hope for that I'd be able to recapture those that are on my blog but YT says are "no longer available"? Is there a Santa Claus? Huh? Huh?

In any event, I'll do that safety net from here on out, but it would be miraculous if I can recapture those golden oldies that I seem to have lost.

I like this way since it makes sense and I will be able to do it on any machine safari is on.

I have a minor glitch though: I had VLC.app which I used for opening video. That's what tired to open get_video. Didn't work. So I installed Perian. How do I tell my Mac to use Perian to open get_video? I tried another and now it opens in TeachText.

OpenWith does not list Perian.

Yes, RP is a PITA. But is it convenient and automatic? Yes too. Am I ashamed that I prefer convenience and automation. Hmmm . . . . I'll get back to you on that.

Did you rename the 'get_video' file to include the .flv extension?

Also, with Perian installing as a plugin, you won't see Perian in the "Open With" list. It simply opens with QuickTime, and Perian does the translation inside of QT.