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YouTube is hands down the best place to watch your favourite videos, be in music videos, celebrity videos, movies, DIY tutorials, cooking classes; well, let’s just say videos on anything and everything under the sun. Wait! Even beyond the sun (think videos of cosmology and space). A recent study stated that there are videos worth over 1000 years (if played nonstop) uploaded on YouTube!
Watching Online vs. Downloading
Yes, it covers the widest range of topics and interests. But, these videos can be watched only online via live video streaming. It would be always better to be able to have a directory of all your favourite videos so you can watch them offline as well.
Fortunately, there are a number of ways in which, you can download YouTube videos online and watch them. So, how can it be done? There are a few online techniques as well as offline ones. Here is a brief description of the ways by which one can download a YouTube video:
- YouTube Downloader’s:
This is one of the most popular ways to download YouTube videos. They are typically 3rd party software that is used to convert a YouTube video into a video file and download it for offline viewing. These are reliable ways of converting the YouTube video into a downloadable version. There are many applications that are available free online for just about anyone to use. Apart from these software packages, there are other generic applications that download just the audio of a YouTube video and convert it into an MP3 format. This can then be synced to your audio device.
There are certain download managers that are available that have imbedded facilities download videos from a variety of video streaming websites like YouTube, Daily Motion etc. example, Free Download Manager. Examples of such standalone applications for YouTube are – Audio Lite (this application records media streams for the video streaming website so you can watch the video offline, and MP3jam (this is used for creating audio files in MP3 formats that can be inturn synced into your portable MP3 players.
- Online Converters:
All that one has to do is paste the URL of the video onto the text box provided in these applications, and they automatically convert the YouTube video into a downloadable version, and then download this version onto your computer in any desired location. If you like cloud-based software, then this is the best way to download your favourite YouTube video. The main advantage of using this method is that you do not have to download any third party applications onto your system. The disadvantage is that, these websites have limited number of features when compared to the downloaded applications. But they still have options of converting the downloadable version into different formats.
- Offline Converters:
If you have downloaded videos in the .FLV format and would like to play these on portable devices that do not support this video format, then you would find an offline convertor very useful. This application can convert it into formats like MP4, MPG and WMV. These are also very convenient especially if you would want to transfer videos to your tablet.
These are the various methods commonly used for converting YouTube videos that have actually taken entertainment to another level all together!