Downloading YouTube Video with Firebug
Important Note: Although this method might work for some of the time it will not work all the time. Please see the addendum for more details.
Firebug is a cool bit of software that lets you see requests that your browser (Firefox only of course) is making to the server. For YouTube this includes the video file from Google's CDN. Firstly, install Firebug
Then go to YouTube, open the Firebug panel and turn on the Net panel.
Search for the video you want to download and click it.
Look in the list at the bottom for all the requests that have been
sent from your browser when loading this page... wao, lots eh? Look for
the one that is still being downloaded, generally you will find
"videoplayback" in the URL, in the picture above (click
for a larger version) you can see it highlighted in blue. Right
click on this and open in new tab.
Unfortunatley in some versions of Firefox (most of the new ones that support H.264) this will just start playing the video in a new tab :-( in that case you should copy it into the clipboard (to do this right click and then click Copy Location) then paste it into the box below:
Then click "Show", right click on the link and "Save Link
As...". That is it! You now have a file called
videoplayback that you can play with MPlayer (you may
want to rename it so it has a .flv or .mp4
extension.
Addendum
Sometimes YouTube will chunk video into 1.7MB chunks, I tried
getting all these chunks and concatenating them but that did not
work. To fix this problem you first have to seek the video to the end
and then look for the last videoplayback request. Copy the
request to the clipboard paste it into a notepad window and then change
the starting offset to 0. I will explan this in more detail, and
with pictures:
In the image below you can see the various requests my browser has
made to the server a is a 1.7Mb chunk and b is
a 1.5Mb chunk at the end of the file, this is the important one because
in the request for this file is the end offset of the whole video.
Right click on this URL and click Copy Location then
change the beggining offset (the first number after range=
to 0. I left the second number alone (172830719) this is
the end offset. Your URL should look a little like this (the URL is
long so I have cut some of it out, but you still need all of it!)
http://o-o.preferred.lga15s26.v5.lscache4.youtube.com/...CUT...mt=1342690584&mv=m&range=0-172830719&signature=6C4B980479...
Paste the resulting URL into the box on this page then right click, save as and job done ;-) When I get chance I will write a quick chrome plugin to do this... it is not that hard is it?
As you can see the file I downloaded is bigger than 1.7Mb!
Extracting the Audio
So, you have downloaded that wonderful video of talking cats and now you want to put it onto your mobile phone as a ringtone.