How To Download YouTube Videos To Your Computer

The hottest thing in the world of the Internet today is video downloads and the hottest site for accessing them is Google-owned YouTube. There are plenty of different reasons that YouTube is the site that people are using including that its marketing has made it well-known, its breadth of content is huge and it is very user-friendly. But, if you are just getting on the bandwagon of accessing video online, you might be wondering how to download YouTube videos to your computer. You don't want to look like a computer-ignorant kid, so you certainly don't want to ask anyone how to do it. Don't worry; it's easy.

Here's what you need to do in order to download YouTube videos to your computer:

• 1. First, you'll need to go to the YouTube site. Type the phrase into your favorite search engine to find it or go directly to http://youtube.com/. Note that, even though Google owns YouTube, doing a "video" search in the Google search engine does not bring up the same search results as searching on YouTube because Google video includes YouTube as well as content from other sites. So, yes, you need to go to YouTube.
• 2. On YouTube, find the content that you want to download. Copy the URL code for the video which you'll see in the video information box located to the right of the video on the screen where you're watching it play.
• 3. Now, open up a new window or a new tab on your computer to take yourself to another website. Yep, that's right. You can't actually download YouTube videos from YouTube itself straight to your computer so you're going to need to go somewhere else. The two most popular sites are KeepVid and Javimoya.
• 4. Each of these sites have their own directions. We'll look at the directions for KeepVid to cover the basics. So, you go to KeepVid and you'll see a box where you are asked to enter your video's URL code. Take the code that you copied from YouTube and paste it into this box. You will also see a second (drop-down) box where you can choose the location of the video. Obviously, you select YouTube from that drop-down menu.
• 5. Follow the instructions to download the file. Basically, this just means clicking on the download link and then saving the file to a spot on your computer where you'll be able to find it (such as on your desktop or in a file you've created for your videos).
• 6. Note that many of the videos that you download from YouTube will download really easy on an external site like KeepVid but then won't run properly. In most cases, this is because your saved file is a Flash Video file (or .flv). This just means that you need to download an FLV player in order to run the video. If need be, this is the final step in how to download (and play!) your favorite YouTube videos.

Sure, YouTube is user-friendly but it's not so user-friendly that it's made it possible to download videos directly from the site. That's okay; as you can see it's not too difficult to copy the URL code from YouTube and head over to an external video download site like KeepVid where you can download with ease. Now you can look like one of the cool kids without having to ask anyone how to do it!