There are plenty of browser plugins that allow you to download videos from websites like YouTube. A few of them even allow you to convert the video to a different format to suit your needs. However most of them are either complex, require further processing, or simply break every time the browser gets updated. Thankfully, there’s a free Mac OS X app that does it quickly and easily.
Evom from TheLittleAppFactory does just that. Evom allows you to convert online video to a number of formats, including iPod, Apple TV and HTML5.
The easiest way I’ve found is to drag the Favicon of the YouTube page containing the video you wish to convert to the desktop, then to the Evom window. Evom does the rest for you. In my tests, it worked on YouTube and a number of other sites perfectly.
timmy!!!!
Sweet. Thanks for posting.
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).