In this tutorial, we’ll be downloading YouTube videos using Mozilla Firefox and Live HTTP Headers. Note, however, that this is not the easiest way to save a YouTube video, and that downloading videos are against YouTube’s Terms of Service. With that said, we’ll be downloading a Firefox advertisement. Download the Live HTTP Headers extension here (We’re assuming you already have Firefox).
To download a YouTube video, we’ll be:
Need more help? A tutorial with images follows (you can click the images for a larger view).
On the Firefox menu bar, click Tools → Live HTTP Headers.
The Live HTTP Headers window should pop up. Switch to the Generator tab, and uncheck Images & CSS, and check Request.
Open up the YouTube video page. A bunch of entries should popup into the Live HTTP Headers window. Look for the following pattern:
#request# GET http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=random letters/numbers&t=random letters/numbers
Find it? Right click and select Copy.
Get into a new tab (Ctrl+T). Right click the Location Bar and select Paste.
![Deleting \](http://thirderror.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/del_request_get.png "Deleting \")
Go to the beginning of the URL, and get rid of the #request# GET portion.
Hit Enter. A window much like the above picture should appear. Select Save File, and click OK.
Now you should be prompted where to save the YouTube video. For the sake of simplicity, I chose My Documents. The file name should say get_video. Rename it or whatever, but make sure to add .flv at the end, so that if you named it get_video, it should now be get_video.flv. Click Save, wait a bit, and the YouTube video should have downloaded. To play the file, you’ll need an FLV player (we recommend VLC, although apparently RealPlayer plays FLV files) or convert the video file into another format.
