Why pay when it’s free?
If you search YouTube with the phrase “Me at the Zoo” you will find a video of a guy in San Diego Zoo. The video is nothing special. The guy is saying something about the elephant having a long trunk and that is all. Yet the number of views for this video is 5,694,897 and 37,595 comments. “What the hell” right? Well the reason for this video to be viewed so many times is that this is the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube. The guy on the video is Jawed Karim, one of the three founders of YouTube. It was uploaded on 23rd April, 2005. And after that YouTube went live and now it is the largest video site on the planet earth.
The reason for YouTube to be so popular that it is free, almost any videos can be found there and the videos come in very small size so that people with low bandwidth can also view them. Though you cannot download the videos directly, there are many other ways to download them and YouTube does not prohibit those methods. Let us take a look at some of those methods.
If you search for it, you will find some websites that will offer you to find the video links on YouTube but they will charge you for it. Why pay for something that is already free? You can download the videos right from your browser. If you are using Mozilla Firefox then there are a number of add-ons available that you can use. Go to the tools menu (if you are using an older version) or under the Firefox menu on the top left. Choose add-ons and a window will appear. On the search box, write “Video downloadhelper” or “YouTube downloader” and search for it. A number of add-ons will be shown. Choose the one you like and click “Add to Firefox” or “Install”. After the add-on installs itself from the Internet, you will be required to restart Firefox. And then go to the YouTube video that you want to download. Depending on the add-on you are using you will find a dropdown menu around the video or navigation toolbar or the status bar (old versions). The menu will have the options for you to download the desired video.
If you are a Mac user and don’t use Mozilla Firefox, don’t worry. There is free YouTube downloader Mac as well. Mac’s default browser is Safari. You can download YouTube videos from Safari as well. In this case you won’t be using add-on. You won’t have to install anything from the Internet also. There is another option that is available on Safari and you can use that as the YouTube downloader for Mac. Go to the Safari browser and press Command + A (for Mac) or Ctrl + Alt + A (for Windows). The activity window will open. This window shows all the activities that are going on in a webpage including the contents and their URL. Now go to the YouTube video that you want. The activity window will show a label which will look like the following: “page title” – YouTube. “Page title” is the title of the page you are viewing. Click on the label and the label will expand to show all the activities that are happening on that page and to the right you will see the size of the contents. Find the largest size. That is your video. Double click on it and Safari will open it in a new tab and show you the option if you want to download it. Click on the save button and Safari will download the video for you.
If all these add-ons and extra window and activities and searching seems too much for you to download one video then there is another way. You can use the Wondershare Free YouTube Downloader. You will just have to download and install it. As the name says, it’s free so you won’t have to pay anything. After installation is complete go to the video page and you will see a floating Window labeled “Download”. Click on it and your video will be downloaded. You can download this downloader for both Windows and Mac. Just go to the following links and choose the one you want. Links are: http://www.wondershare.com/pro/mac-free-youtube-downloader.html (for Mac) and http://www.wondershare.com/pro/free-youtube-downloader.html (for Windows). You will also find other methods of downloading the video using Wondershare Free YouTube Downloader.
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