Ripping Videos from YouTube…

Sounds wrong I know.. but I have had some problems recently having launched on online TV station with organisations only having copies of videos available on YouTube.

It seems that their PR or marketing companies had uploaded the programs and failed to provide a disc of originals to the organisations. The first couple of times this happend I put down to lethargy in the organisations internal marketing departments not wanting to be bothered to send me the files, but after the fifth time it seemed to be a trend.

So I had permission to use the footage but no way of embedding clean visuals without the YouTube logo, I also would much prefer to host and control the footage myself.

There are a few online sites that will rip the video for you and allow you to save it as .FLV or .MP4.

Some examples are:
http://keepvid.com/
http://vixy.net/

These worked ok but were quite slow and wouldn’t rip the HD versions of the video. After some searching I stumbled across MacTubes.

This neat little app (yes Mac only I’m afraid), is free to download and use and works fantastically well. It allows you to search, play and download videos from YouTube even in HD 720p and 1080p versions if they are available.

System requirements:

• Only for Mac OS X.
• Universal binary application supported PowerPC / Intel(R) processor. (Maybe)
• Mac OS X 10.4.2 or higher / Mac OS X 10.5 or higher.(Maybe)
• Safari 2.0 or higher / Adobe Flash Player Plug-ins 9.0 or higher

Download:

http://brpg.hp.infoseek.co.jp/mactubes/index_en.html

Screenshots: