Comments on: Save a YouTube video

By: Miraz Jordan

Miraz Jordan — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 01:38:18 +0000

@BruceHoult pointed out: If you’ve installed Perian (every Mac should have Perian and Flip4Mac) then any QuickTime-aware app can play it, not just VLC.

By: Roshan

Roshan — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 15:27:48 +0000

Very useful. Thanks a lot

By: Miraz Jordan

Miraz Jordan — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 02:34:01 +0000

Well, John, scroll up and read the instructions on this page that tell you how to save a YouTube video to your Mac. :-)

By: john

john — Wed, 30 Nov 2011 22:07:59 +0000

I need to keep revisiting video in youtube for music lessons. I find the programmes like Keepvid and wondershare don’t work for me but there again I am not super cleaver with computers is there a easy wasy to download video to a mac?

By: Miraz Jordan

Miraz Jordan — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 06:16:27 +0000

Hi Rosie,

it sounds as though the wrong app is opening it. Do you show file extensions on your Mac? If the file extension is .flv or .m4v or similar then instead of double clicking to open it try this. Right click (Control click) on the file and choose Open With from the menu that appears. Open with Quicktime or VLC or similar.

Does that help?

By: Rosie

Rosie — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 21:23:48 +0000

This always worked well for me, but now has stopped. I can find the downloading file of several Mb, and double clicking makes it download, but when the file has downloaded, and claims to be eg 10Mb, when I open it it says it is a ‘plain text’ file and is full of code, couldn’t possibly be 10Mb as it claims. What has changed? What can I do about it? Any suggestions would be gratefully received!

By: Andrew

Andrew — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 06:04:41 +0000

Great tip, but I’m having one problem with it. It seems that you can only download 7 minutes of video. I am trying to download a ten minute tv show episode, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Any advise?

By: Miraz Jordan

Miraz Jordan — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 04:52:36 +0000

Hi tc,

I can only think that maybe in Step 4 above you’re not Option clicking on the correct file. Make sure you’re getting the biggest item as that will be the movie.

i just checked again with a movie I’ve never seen before and it worked just fine.

By: tc

tc — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:05:33 +0000

tried several time
saves in downloads as an html & uses safari to open & play
downloaded vlc media player & tries to open the html, did not work

what am i doing incorrectly

converting from pc to mac(10.5.8) the last year
please help
tc

By: Sophie

Sophie — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 22:27:43 +0000

Thank you so much for this!! Worked perfectly and kept me from having to download another application that might not have worked! (: By the way, Handbrake (google it) is a fantastic program for converting .flv and almost any other file types to mp4 and AVI files, so try that if you need another file type for the videos you’re downloading.