The Apple Files

Downloading YouTube videos for offline viewing (on you iPod or in iTunes) is a lot easier than you may initially think. Of course, there are utilities like TubeSock that will copy videos from YouTube for you. This will however set you back $15. Why pay $15 when there’s a free and easy way to download videos from YouTube?

Step 1
In Safari, open the YouTube page that contains the video you want to download.

Step 2
Click on the “Window” menu and then click on “Activity” (Option+Command+A)

This will bring up the Safari Activity Window.

Step 3
Within the Activity window, click to expand the activity related to the YouTube page.

Step 4
Now, simply look through the list of items and double click on the one corresponding to the video. An easy way to identify this is to look for the largest sized item. In the above screenshot, this is the 20.8 MB item.

The download should start!

After the download is complete, you will have a .flv file. You can rename it to something more meaningful like myvideo.flv

The .flv file is of flash video format. The next step will convert the flash video into the more common iPod and iTunes compatible .mp4 format.

Step 5
Open up iSquint (Free Download) and drag the myvideo.flv file in and click “Start”.

Once the conversion is done, you will have a video file that you can easily import into iTunes and play anytime, even when you don’t have an internet connection.

If you want to transfer the video to your iPod, make sure you select “Optimize for iPod” before clicking “Start” in iSquint. After importing the file into iTunes, simply sync your iPod and there you have it, YouTube to Go!

For those of you that use Front Row, once you import the YouTube video into iTunes, it will also be accessible from videos within the Front Row interface!