The easiest way to download Youtube videos in Linux :)
Have you ever wondered to write an application to download a youtube video in linux ?? If you are too geeky , u can do something so complex like , use awk ( which is string processor ) to download you tube videos ( refer this ) . But i am in no position to learn awk just to download youtube videos.So i happened to get to my /tmp folder and realised that a cp command would do the job 
Lemme first point out that this method would work for any video that you can watch on your firefox browser ( or any other browser for that matter ) .
All i am gonna do is use a cp command to download youtube videos. Some times things are so simple in Linux you see.
Say you are watching a youtube video in firefox and want to download , you need to do the following .( Donot close the page that hosts the video )
1. Let the video to load completely .
2. Once the video gets loaded completely, open your terminal and do the following :
a=`ls /tmp/Flash*` && cp $a ~/Desktop/1.flv
Voila !!! Thats it .. you are done.. You would find the video in your desktop . Basically when your browser plays the video , it maintains a temporary copy of it in /tmp folder with a name Flash followed by some string . So in case you wanna download , all you have to do is , before closing the site from which you are viewing the video , copy it on to your hard disk . So simple isnt it ??
In case you have more than one video files in the tmp directory , do the following
for i in `ls /tmp/Flash*`
do
cp $i ~/Desktop/$(basename $i).flv
done
And tht should copy all Flash video files into your desktop.
Leave any simpler ways to do if so in the comments . Also if the above method fails in any case…
wow
didn’t know this. 
cute one 
I don’t think I’ll use keepvid after this 
sp2hari
February 1, 2009 at 12:49 am
lol.. me neigther gonna go to http://downloadyoutubevideo.com
actually i noticed this once whn i was viewing a rar file.. whn i tried to view without extracting , it created a copy in my home folder with cryptic file name
Sathya Narayanan
February 1, 2009 at 1:40 am
Sounds like a good way but does it get at all messed up if there is more then one flash thing running in firefox? Say some ads running in another tab?
Alpha_Cluster
February 1, 2009 at 3:17 am
hmmm.. sounds like a problem.. but whn u use the second one , it copies all flash files into your desktop… u can then chose which one to retain.. will find out and get back to u if any better solution possible…
Sathya Narayanan
February 1, 2009 at 9:43 am
[...] The easiest way to download Youtube videos in Linux « Sathya’s … [...]
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March 2, 2009 at 6:28 am
I prefer using youtubedl. It’s a command line python script which also supports batch downloading.
thecommutist
September 21, 2009 at 3:39 am
Hi this is nice one…i dont have the flash player in firefox!i have the url only.how can i download the video?
Kannan
October 22, 2009 at 12:42 pm
check out the awk one which i have given as link . Tht shud work provided youtube hasnt changed how it delivers the videos ..
Sathya Narayanan
October 22, 2009 at 5:41 pm
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