Linux: Backup of Youtube videos

[^rooker]

GNU/Linux is awesome! Today I read an article about clive on ubuntuforums.org, where someone mentioned that youtube flash-video files are stored in /tmp.

I think you can guess where this is going...

1) Open a file-explorer (e.g. Konqueror, Nautilus) and open /tmp
2) Open youtube in a browser. e.g. FireFox
3) Watch /tmp in the file explorer and you should find a file called something like "FlashITXfHE". This is your .swf file containing the youtube video.
4) Make sure that the video is completely loaded (that's when progress bar is completely red)
5) Copy/Paste the "FlashITX..." file and rename it to something like "video_backup_youtube.swf"


That's it.

[^rooker]

UPDATE:
The /tmp approach doesn't work anymore. It's still good to know though, as some Flash apps still *do* dump some files in /tmp.
For youtube however, it is better to use "youtube-dl" (Youtube Downloader) - a great Python program which does all the work for you:

In order to pertain the YouTube ID, but still give the file a human readable name, just call it like this:

Code: Select all

youtube-dl -t <youtube_url>