Download Youtube Video With Safari

LogoYoutube provides so many videos for us, and then sometimes I want to save the video into my laptop to play it next time. Unfortunately, Youtube doesn’t provide a tool or menu to save their video collection. You can find many software or Firefox plugins to help you to save Youtube video. But do you have known, you can save the video with Safari without added plugin. And this is a good trick especially for Mac user.
If you want to try this trick, open your Safari application first. And here are the steps to save their video:
1. Type www.youtube.com in URL box to open youtube.com.
Type URL

2. Locate the video which you will download. You can search them first. Usually, I was using the search box. To use it, type the video keyword. For example, I want to find anything that linked to iMac word, so I type “imac” (without double quote) in box then press Enter.
Search keyword

3. After Youtube finds the video which related to your keyword, you can see them in result page, choose one in result list by click its link.
Youtube result

4. When the video has displayed,
Video is loading

open Safari’s Activity window by click Window – Activity menu.
Video is loading

5. In Activity window, find item which contains a word get_video and usually has biggest file size (To determine file size you can find it at Status field) and then double click that item.
Activity window

6. Then Safari will download that file automatically, and you can see the download status in Downloads window that open automatically too.
Downlaod file

7. After the file has downloaded, you’ll get a file that named: get_video and by default, Safari put it at Desktop.
get_video file

8. Rename that file with your own name but give it .flv extension
Rename .flv file

click Add button when you asked.
Confirmation change extension

then you’ll get a result file with .flv extension (In my case, I give it name: imac.flv)
Result

9. Double click it to open the video.
Playing video

Make sure that you’ve had installed FLV Player. I use this VLC Player to play FLV file on my Mac. I never try this on Safari for Windows but I think you can run on it too.
(article no:0122)

6 Comments

Timmy  on October 19th, 2008

Cool!.. Nice work…g

Alex  on March 1st, 2009

Thank for making this valuable information available to the public.

OS2Guy  on August 3rd, 2009

I’m sorry but this is just unacceptable when compared with FireFox which offers several easy to download YouTube of other FLV SWF videos. Opening the activity window and *trying* to find the YouTube video you want is so confusing. Safari needs a simple/easy to use plugin for downloading YouTube, XTube and other “tube-type” videos. Get off your cans developers and give us something cool.

tristan  on November 7th, 2010

try zamzar.com

for safari, it works much easeir

Anna Brooks  on April 14th, 2011

If you download movies via Safari it’s rather difficult to separate out various flash flies from the ads and the .swfs and to pick the right one. So it’s better to use YouTube downloader. For example Elmedia Player PRO (http://mac.eltima.com/youtube-downloader-mac.html)

Lance  on July 10th, 2011

Elmedia has malware embedded in it.

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