Downloading Youtube Videos in Ubuntu
Thanks to some of my seniors and a few websites I found online, I discovered that downloading you tube videos is indeed a piece of cake.
So you watch a YouTube video, and you liked it, and you watch it again. But at a later point of time, you feel like watching the video again, but your free download quota is filled and watching videos is a strict no no. Now you think it would have been better if you had downloaded the video and had a copy on your system.
A google search gives you several websites, that let you do the same, download you tube videos.
But the method I feature here, uses the fact that, when you watch a video on YouTube, you are actually downloading it to your computer. It’s cached in your temporary files and folders.
In windows, finding that particular file is a headache. Yes, I mean it. But enter Ubuntu, and the whole task is simplified.
So how do you do it?
First, watch the video completely, or at least let the red bar load fully, ie, let the video stream completely.
Go to /tmp/ folder. Use cd /tmp for that from the terminal.
You should find files like this “Flash***”. Those are your youtube videos. Copy or move them to your home folder and you have successfully obtained the file.
Make it more clearer.
If you just didn’t get things right, then here’s what you need to do, from the terminal. (Press [Alt]+[F2] and type gnome-terminal. It opens the terminal.)
Then run this command.
cp /tmp/Flash* ~/Desktop/
This will copy the Flash files to your Desktop.
Enjoy the videos, without hurting your bandwidth and your pocket!
