Downloading YouTube videos has never
been easier
A side from viewing video of kittens
falling into toilets, Youtube has a weighty selection of classic old movies,
such as Plan 9 from Outer Space, Spacehunter: Adventures in the Forbidden Zone,
Zontar The Thing From Venus and of course, 12 Angry Men.
There are loads, but how would you go about
downloading one or all of these onto your PC and why? The reasons why you would
want to download a YouTube video are many. Perhaps you want to watch a movie
later but your bandwidth suffers after 5pm. Maybe you want to download it as an
MP4 or AVI so you can watch it in bed via a tablet that's not currently hooked
up to the internet? Or you want a collection for when you're away and there's
no internet connection available? Whatever the reasons may be, here's how.
Freemake Video Converter
There are a number of ways in which to
download a YouTube video. Some are third-party programs that will allow you to
download then convert the video into other formats. Others are add-ons for the
browser you're using and will download the content at the click of a button.
There are plenty of alternatives around these days, but for this How To, we'll
be using the excellent Freemake Video Converter.
First off, head to goo.gl/2hUUg, the
Freemake Video Converter home page, scroll down to the bottom and click on the
big green Download button. Freemake Video Converter comes in at around 1.2MB,
so it's not too demanding on bandwidth.
Once it’s downloaded, run the installer and
select your language via the drop-down menu. Next, you can tick or untick the
box to send anonymous usage statistics to Freemake. Personally, we usually
untick instances like this, but it's up to you.
Boot
into Linux and open the drive containing Windows.
The next window will display the Express or
Custom setup, of which the Custom appears to be greyed out. It's not: you can
click on the radio button next to custom and it'll appear and it will give you
the opportunity to remove the generally unwanted Trustworthy Toolbar, remove
the option to set default search and new tabs to Trustworthy and remove the
home page setup to Trustworthy. It's a shame that Freemake has decided to
include the Trustworthy stuff, as it's not at all necessary and just messes
things up and adds to the unwanted clutter on the system. But, at any rate,
consider this as good practice and to always select 'Custom' in case the
developers decide to include something you don't want.
The next item on the list is Tuneup
Utilities 2013, which can also be selected as Custom and not installed. By now,
you're probably wondering why we even bothered with Freemake, and we can't
blame you, to some degree, but bear with us; the software is really very good,
and worth it's in the end.
Finally, click on Custom once more on the
next window and opt to install the browser plug-ins and the desktop icon (if
you want one) and choose your destination installation folder. Once the
installation has downloaded the latest updates, it'll ask you to exit along
with a tick to run Freemake Video Converter after the setup wizard has
finished.
YouTube Downloading
Providing everything went okay with the
installation of Freemake Video Converter, you should now be looking at the
initial screen, with icons for video sources along the top and various outputs
along the bottom of the main window.
Find
Utilman.exe,, then rename it to Utilmanl.exe
Now open up your browser and point it to
the YouTube video of your choice, then set it running (to get past any annoying
adverts) and select the desired quality settings. As the YouTube video starts,
pause it, then right-click the video and select ‘Copy Video URL’ from the menu.
Next, Alt-Tab into Freemake Video Converter
and click on the ‘Paste URL’ button, located in the top set of button, to the
far right. This will automatically enter the video into the main window and
display a thumbnail, along with the feature’s length, title and URL.
From here, select one of the destination
media file types along the bottom of the main Freemake Video Converter window;
MP4 is the more accepted media type for modern devices and stand-alone players.
Once you’ve selected the destination media
type, use the parameters window to further customize the screen size and
conversion options to your own tastes or simply leave them with one of the
default settings from the Preset drop-down menu. Enter a name for the video,
Freemake will usually try to guess the best name and location and choose the
encoding speed and limit the output size if needed. These options can be played
with at a later date or if you already know what you’re doing and if you have a
particular preference, otherwise don’t worry too much and go for one of the
defaults.
When you’re ready, simply click on the
Convert button and Freemake will download the video from YouTube, then convert
it to the destination media type you just selected.
Play And Enjoy
After a few minutes, depending on the
download speeds and the converting prowess of your PC, you should have your VouTube
video nicely converted and ready to play on pretty much any modern PC, player,
console or device to hand.
Find
CMD.exe, copy it,, then rename it to Utilman.exe
It’s worth noting that this method is just
one of many. For example, you’ll now notice that Freemake has placed a Video
Converter icon on your browser that can be clicked, and the above process is
conducted without you having to copy and paste the URL. However, there are
times when you need to be more specific about the video you want to download,
so using the long, drawn-out approach that we did here at least shows you a
fool-proof way of getting the video you want.
Conclusion
As we said, there are a hundred and one
programs available for downloading YouTube videos, of which Freemake Video
Converter is but one. It is, though, a pretty stable program and one that’s
really easy to use and very effective at producing great results, once you get
more into the output resolutions, frame rates and so on.
On the whole, FreeMake Video Converter is a
very impressive and powerful application. It runs reasonably quickly when
converting big files and successfully managed to stand up to the rigorous
testing procedure we put it through. Additionally, some not bad-looking menus
can be created when converting to DVD or Blu-ray, which puts FVC firmly into
the disc creator’s good books.
Freemake Video Converter Supported Sites
Freemake Video Converter can support a
number of sites, from which to download the content. In fact, there are over
10,000 plus websites supported, which is quite a lot by anyone’s reckoning,
Here are a few of the more popular you may be interested in: YouTube, Facebook,
FIickr, Vkontakte, Break, Liveleak, Hulu, NicoVideo, Photobucket, Vimeo, Dailymotion
