I know a lot of people who search for online and offline tools (applications) to download youtube videos. My favourite app still remains the “youtube-dl” command but its even easier to save the videos from Firefox. While its basic knowledge that a browser uses its cache to store temporary data, we seldom make use of it.

The easiest way to save a youtube video is to:

  • Load youtube.com in Firefox, and browse to the video you wish to download
  • Be patient, let the video load completely
  • Browse to the Firefox Cache directory (/home/<user>/.mozilla/firefox/*/Cache/)and check for “Video” files
  • Copy over the Video file to the desired location

An example:

[vimal@vimal ~]$ cd .mozilla/firefox/*/Cache/
[vimal@vimal Cache]$ pwd
/home/vimal/.mozilla/firefox/qvpmpj5j.default/Cache
[vimal@vimal Cache]$ file * | grep Video
D662A834d01: Macromedia Flash Video
[vimal@vimal Cache]$ ls -lh D662A834d01
-rw-------. 1 vimal vimal 27M 2010-06-16 15:30 D662A834d01
[vimal@vimal Cache]$ cp D662A834d01 ~/Videos/Sexy Love - Neyo.flv

Now, if you are downloading a high-quality video, sometimes the video just gets removed from cache as soon as it is completely downloaded. This happens when you run out of cache space. If you are attempting to download a huge video, make some cache space first. To do that, point Firefox to “about:config” and increase the value of browser.cache.disk.capacity. NO MORE YOUTUBE DOWNLOAD SOFTWARES!! (well, this woks for all videos that you watch online, not just youtube)