Well, copyright laws prevent YouTube and the other video sharing websites from explicitly providing a service for downloading the videos. This has led to a lot of additional sites to help download these videos.

Though there are a few scripts like GreaseMonkey that can be of use, I thought another website that I found that was pretty much easy and quick as well.

I made use of the service at YouTubex (notice the ‘x’ suffix). Here, simply copy and paste the URL of the video page of either YouTube, Google Video or Metacafe. And click on download. If required, give the file extension as .flv

The video downloads just like any other file download from the internet.

To view this file however, you need a flash movie viewer. I have VLC player installed on my computer. You can either use such a media player to view the movie, or you can convert the file with .flv extension to any of the standard format like .AVI or .MPEG using the FLV encoders.

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