Member Avatar for sangeetha.r44

Videos from youtube can be downloaded by various means.
But some of the videos belong to a particular channel which cannot be downloaded by any youtube download softwares that i tried.
Eg: The videos 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ugiANaZQSkI&feature=watch-now-button&wide=1' or 'http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BkNc2rlLSgk&feature=watch-now-button&wide=1' belong to youtube channels and cannot be downloaded by many of the video download softwares like internet download manager, etc i tried. They only seem to download a .htm file and nothing more. Please let me know if there are any softwares that help in doing this.

Note:This is solely for personal usage and is not intended towards copyright violation.

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Short answer: the behavior you describe (downloaders grabbing a .htm or a tiny temp file instead of an MP4/FLV) usually means the player is not serving a single progressive file. Many YouTube/channel uploads are delivered with HTML5 Media Source Extensions (MSE) and adaptive streaming (DASH/HLS): audio and video often come as separate, short segments or as protected streams, so a simple URL grab fails. As discovered, viewing source can help for old/progressive files, but it won't work reliably against segmented or protected delivery. (developer.mozilla.org)

A robust, long‑term fix is a maintained downloader that understands manifests and can merge streams (and a muxer like FFmpeg). yt‑dlp (actively maintained fork of youtube‑dl) detects DASH/HLS formats, downloads separate audio+video fragments and can merge them using ffmpeg; it also accepts channel URLs/playlists. Example workflow (install yt‑dlp and ffmpeg, then run): 

yt-dlp -f bestvideo+bestaudio --merge-output-format mp4 <video-or-channel-URL>

This will download best video and audio and mux them into a single MP4 (ffmpeg required). (github.com)

Troubleshooting tips: use the browser DevTools (Network or Media panels) to inspect requests — look for .mpd, .m3u8 or many videoplayback fragment requests (that indicates adaptive/segmented delivery). If a video is age/region‑restricted or requires login, pass cookies or use yt‑dlp's --cookies / --cookies-from-browser options rather than trying to capture the cache. The browser‑cache trick noted by and can work for old/progressive streams, but it is fragile for MSE/DASH and often yields incomplete/fragmented data. (developer.chrome.com)

Caveats: check YouTube's terms and copyright rules before downloading — YouTube forbids copying content except where explicitly allowed. IDM or similar GUI grabbers (as mentioned by ) will work when a single progressive file is available, but their own docs note they cannot download protected/encrypted/protocols not supported by IDM. Use yt‑dlp + ffmpeg for the most reliable results, and only download material you are allowed to keep. ()

Recommended Answers

All 13 Replies

Member Avatar for rubberman

Sometimes I have to set my browser to display the raw html code so I can see what the real URL is for the video. Then, I can download from that URL directly to an FLV file. That I can either play with a suitable video player such as VLC, or I can convert it to another more usable format (mpg2, etc) using a video transcoder such as ffmpeg.

Member Avatar for rubberman

Well using the extracted URL http://youtu.be/ugiANaZQSkI I was able to get this to play in Chrome on my Linux (RHEL 6) system. I can't find the actual file URL to download however, so it may be protected. I'll repost if I find a way to access it.

Member Avatar for jingda

The video seems too long. Maybe your youtube downloader is unable to handle such a big movie.

Member Avatar for caperjack

I'll tell u a little way to get it. I made this video, and if you watch it you'll realize you can download from any website with ease.

Youtube Video on how videos are stored

did you have to do it so friken fast .lol

Member Avatar for rubberman

did you have to do it so friken fast .lol

Just had to make the rest of us look a bit lame (sic) - :-)

Just in case somebody doesn't know, Lame is the producer of one of the most popular mp3 codecs out there... :-)

Member Avatar for caperjack

not going to take my Ritalin for a couple of days and then maybe i will be able to keep up with it .lol

Member Avatar for timetraveller92

Mind commenting about my video? Was is remotely useful?? I'm wondering here if you found it as an easy way and useful or not!

Member Avatar for caperjack

sorry i cant follow all the pages changing so fast ,gave up trying ,but i did get the gist of it, watch the video so that it gets saved to temp file and then make changes to its extension and walla you got the video ,or something like that

Edited by caperjack because: n/a
Member Avatar for timetraveller92

yep! exactly that
Browsers store videos in a cache folder, thats why when you play the video 2nd time it doesn't buffer. I have given the locations to the cache folder for different browsers in that notepad. Just pasting it in Run box will take you to it and you can just copy paste the video that is stored. This has 2 advantages. One is you save lots of time because you don't need to use a software to redownload it and second is if your using a limited internet connection with charges on data transfer then you save a lot of MB!

Member Avatar for rubberman

Very useful, yes, but less irritating without the sound! :-)

Member Avatar for Member #201682

Install Internet Download Manager (IDM) v6.07.15. Integrate it into your favorite browser and you are done. Just play any online video and IDM will suggest to download that video by blinking 'Download this video" icon on top of that video.

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