Someone asked me if I could explain this and whether it is general knowledge. It is to me… but I AM  a hardcore nerd, so here is the skinny… There are a number of ways to do it and this is my favorite Step by Step:

First go to the YouTube video you want to download in a browser. Make sure you’re on a normal YouTube page and not a channel page… Something with a URL like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mopFR9WEhXo

(Note: It’s ok if there is extra junk after that. The key is that it has this “v=Numbers and Letters” in there somewhere)

If you are on a  channel page, you can get to the right URL by clicking ‘share’ and following the link it provides…

or if you’re looking at a YouTube player embedded on some other website, click the YouTube logo at the bottom right of the player.

Then simply copy the URL, and head over to this website:
KeepVid [For Video]
SnipMP3 [For Audio]

First step… Ignore the Advertisements.
Second… Paste the YouTube URL into the text box there and click ‘Download’

Wait a moment. You may have to “allow” the page access to your computer.
(I think this alert happens because the site uses Javascript, and has your computer searching for the files. Anyway the point is, I’ve been doing this for years, with no malicious code trouble. So allow at your own risk… but I do it. )Then you’ll be given a list of ALL the different low res and high res assets YouTube has available for the video. I generally just download the .MP4 with the highest resolution. In this case it’s  “›› Download MP4 ‹‹ – 720p”

Once the file is downloaded you can do literally anything with it. For Example you can use Apple QuickTime to turn it into a  iPhone, or iPad compatible format. You can put it on a USB and ship it off to a repressive regime or other part of the world without sufficient internet access.

If you are working for eventual broadcast, like me. Or want to edit the file in a professional video editor… I recommend using MPEG STREAMCLIP an incredibly powerful and FREE piece of software, with mac and windows versions. It can turn just about any file type into just about any other.

MPEG Streamclip is also great for getting video files off of DVDs… but that, my friends, is another post.

If you have any trouble please drop me a note in comments, and I’ll do my best to make the blog post more clear.

Happy Downloading.