HOWTO download YouTube videos using Firebug
Here’s a cool little trick I discovered by accident. If you use the excellent Firebug add-on for Firefox you can very easily download YouTube videos without resorting to websites like Keepvid or add-ons like Fast Video Download. Here’s how:
- Start up Firebug by clicking on the logo in the status bar (you might have to right-click and remove the ‘Disable Firebug’ tick)

- Go to the movie on YouTube you want to download
- Go to the ‘Net’ tab in Firebug and locate the ‘get_video’ object, it’s a few megabytes in size, depending on how long the video is

- Right-click on the URL and select ‘Copy location’

- Paste the URL in your favourite download manager. I used wget to download the file like this in a terminal:
$ wget "http://enormous_long_youtube_url" -O video.flv - Play with a movie player that understands FLV such as VLC
- Enjoy! If you liked this article you can digg it.
2 comments on “HOWTO download YouTube videos using Firebug”
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Jan wrote:
A simplier method is to use http://www.tubedownloader.info/
It is a free online tool so you don’t have to install any software. On the site you can find also a step-by-step guide and a video tutorial.
If the video have been uploaded in high quality you can download it also in mp4 format (you can use this on ipod).
Tuesday 29-04-2008
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aja wrote:
i use this everytime i want to download video or mp3 youtube or not
Thursday 08-05-2008