Video Download Helper

I'm now enjoying the LA WC 1994 3 Tenor concert video.

I've had success with:

NetVideoHunter (Firefox addon)

FlashGot (Firefox addon)

Free Download Manager (Windows app with browser plug-ins)
*FDM also supports other browsers including Opera, but I haven't tested that myself.

The two I have used in the past (one FF add-on, one standalone Windows program) no longer work. My guess is that with the recent changes to YouTube's site, some (many? most?) downloaders aren't finding the data where they are expecting it - or they were using the API and perhaps it was modified (or access to some functions restricted).

I have been contemplating writing a GreaseMonkey script for this, but would rather not spend the time if someone already has a working solution. The issue I have with quite a few of the video downloaders I see are that they require going to a third-party site - and since that isn't necessary for downloads, it makes me wonder why they want to send me to those sites. Maybe I should try to find a GreaseMonkey script somebody has already written that does it the way I would...

I rarely download videos, I guess that's why I haven't come up with something that works for me yet. The last YouTube video I downloaded, I searched and extracted the download link from the html source code manually.

Like you, I used to manually get the video files out of the html in the past, but that got to be harder and harder over the years. I'm not much of an html and scripting expert in the first place (I'm a C/C++ guy), and these things seemed to be getting increasingly difficult for me to find. I always intended to write a program to do this, but never got around to it.

The extension that worked for me is a Chrome extension that is in fact on a third-party site, but it seems to be OK.

I used to download YouTube with Video DownloadHelper on Firefox yet it could not detect most YouTube videos on my browser anyhow. Now I use Clipconverter. Copy and paste video URL to download videos. I know HD Video Converter Factory for windows can download various YouTube videos in batch mode. For you who prefer software, it's a good solution.

And when it works, it works well. Less so in recent times because it seems like every click attempts to launch a browser ad. Fortunately, my antivirus strangles them at birth so they're only mildly annoying.

Also, some music videos I've attempted to convert give me an error: "This appears to be copyrighted music and we can't touch it", followed by a link to iTunes. Probably that's the only reason clipconverter is still allowed to operate.

Even the utilities mentioned earlier in this conversation have now given up the ghost, sadly.