Can’t take credit for this one and it’s been around for a long time but it’s new to me. Thanks to MacOShints.com for this great tip. I tried it in YouTube and Vimeo with success. Didn’t work for Hulu however. Sure it will work for most video sharing sites. With YouTube HD files make sure you’re watching the video in HD before downloading. Also, some files are downloaded without and extension so you may need to add the .flv extension once downloaded. So here’s the magic tip below….
If you’re using Safari, there’s an easy way to download YouTube videos. Open the page with the movie and press Command-Option-A, which shows the Activity window. If you’re also loading other sites, you’ll see a list of them: scroll until you find the YouTube page and click on the arrow to show details about what is being loaded.
You will certainly notice an element whose size is over 0.5MB (most of the time, over 5MB). Double-click on it (even if it is still loading), and Safari will download it. When the download is over, navigate to the file in the Finder (which will probably be called get_video) and add the extension .flv to its name. Now you can play it with VLC or with QuickTime (only if you have Perian installed).
