Download and sync YouTube videos offline to iPad/iPhone (mp4)



First of all, let me try to highlight that if I’m downloading YouTube videos to watch offline I don’t feel I am stealing their content. The content was already there, published, free to watch but in some cases it’s just not convenient to sit in front of the computer to watch an hour-long presentation.

I study a lot with my iPad – watching presentations and lectures on it while I cannot really do anything else (on the bus).

However, trying to watch a video on a 3G internet connection just does not cut it. I had to find a way to download YouTube videos and save them to my iPad.

Catch network traffic

The simplest way is to start watching the video, open Chrome’s developer toolbar (CTRL+SHIFT+J or COMMAND+OPTION+J on Mac), switch to the network tab, and check which URL takes so long to download. Copy-paste this URL into a new window and ready to download the MP4 formatted video.

Most of the cases it works, but for some large videos YouTube uses around 10mb chunks for the download hence the whole process is useless.

YouTube downloader

The other, way simpler solution is to use a YouTube downloader tool. I personally hate the bloatware apps with all the ads, backdoor programs and so on, so I tried to find something clean and lean.

Youtube-dl is a Python script which can download the video just by giving it the videos URL:

$ python youtube-dl.py 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bwOhfoewMYs'
(watch out for the quotes!)

To run, you only need Pyton 2.5 or newer and ready to go. The downloader is a single (!) Python script file, so I guess you just cannot find it anything simpler out there. I tested it on larger (1+ hour) videos and worked well all the time.

To get the YouTube downloader, head to http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/

Comments

  1. telugu moviesOctober 29, 2013 at 6:45 PM

    This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

    ReplyDelete
  2. derikJuly 12, 2018 at 7:30 AM

    how to download youtube videos ? find the details linked website and that is best way to download videos to your phone. thanks for sharing you thoughts with us.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MurMurHash3, an ultra fast hash algorithm for C# / .NET

Image
Finding good hash functions for larger data sets is always challenging. The well know hashes, such as MD5, SHA1, SHA256 are fairly slow with large data processing and their added extra functions (such as being cryptographic hashes) isn’t always required either. Performance and low collision rate on the other hand is very important, so many new hash functions were inverted in the past few years. One of the most notable ones is MurMurHash3, which is an improved version of its predecessor (v2). The new version can create both 32 bit and 128 bit hash values, making it suitable for a wide range of applications. 64 bit architecture The 32 bit hash isn’t too important for large amount of data matching, so I only worked with and tested the 128 bit version. The latter one is optimized for x86-64 architecture, giving amazing speeds for data processing. As a 128 bit value consists of two 64 integers, the processor is fairly good with working with such large hash values – they are not byte...
. . .

Read more »

Quick select algorithm - find the Kth element in a list in linear time

Image
Quick select algorithm (Hoare's selection algorithm) – select the Kth element or  the first K element  from a list in linear time Working with large datasets is always painful, especially when it needs to be displayed in a ‘human readable’ format. It is a very frequent task to display only the largest, newest, most expensive etc. items. While sorting the whole dataset definitely gives a correct result, it is much slower than it needs to be – it needs at least O(n*log(n)) time and an it often uses recursion for the sorting, so in practice it can be quite slow. The quick select algorithm can get the top K element from a list of N items in linear time, O(n), with a very reasonable multiplication factor. The quick select does not use recursion so the performance is great for even large datasets. Algorithm The idea of the quick select is quite simple: just like with quicksort, select a random element from the list, and place every item that is smaller to the first half o...
. . .

Read more »

ESP32 - send a push notification from the Arduino ESP32 device to your phone

Image
Sending a push notification to your phone from an event from an ESP32 is simple. What you'll need (if you are using a Mac for development): Arduino IDE Arduino for ESP32 Serial port simulator for ESP32 to upload your code to the board Wifi network IFTTT account IFTTT app on your phone Wifi network that your ESP32 board can access Architecture Create an IFTTT applet This should read something like this: If Maker Event "notification", then Send a notification from the IFTTT app Change the notification template Go to the settings of your new IFTTT applet and change the template to include "Value1", like this: Get your Webhook endpoint in IFTTT On your applet, click the triangle looking thing (webhook), then Settings, or simply go to this URL  https://ifttt.com/maker_webhooks/settings   Visit the private URL in your browser, replace the trigger name with "notification", so it reads like ...trigger/notification/ with/... and in the Value1 field type in a ...
. . .

Read more »