Apologies if this has been covered before - don't remember it if it has. Might be useful for vidders etc.
One of the problems with Youtube and several other video sites is that you can't save the videos. I asked about this on Livejournal and got several responses, ways to save the files initially as Flash videos, then convert them to other formats. Here's what I got for Windows:
First, saving the files turns out to be pretty easy if you use the Opera or Firefox browsers. Nobody mentioned any equivalents for Internet Explorer, but they probably exist. Since I don't use IE unless I have to I didn't ask.
For any recent version of Opera that has widget plug-ins, use their "add widgets" menu to look for a widget called VideoDownloader. This does the job pretty well - just paste the address of the video into it and it saves it as a flash video.
For Firefox, the equivalent add in is at
https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2254/ - I haven't used it but I'm told it works well.
Once you have the flash videos, a program called Riva Encoder can convert them to other formats such as mpg or avi. It's
here. This works, but it's slow and appears to lock up while it's working with no indication of progress - a 3 minute file took about 2 minutes to convert on my 1.75ghz PC, the 8 minute Laurie Anderson video I mentioned a few days ago took 6 or 7 minutes.
For Mac you should be able to use either of the downloaders - there are versions of Firefox and Opera available for OS-X. I'm not sure what you do about converting the Flash videos after that but there is undoubtedly some way of doing it.
