YouTube Video Direct Download Link
You like YouTube? I do. You want to download some of the nice YouTube video clip for offline leisure. So am I.
Besides relying on freeware, you could also copy the YouTube video clips from browser’s cache folder. Now, there is another trick where you could find a hidden direct download link of each YouTube video clips.
Best of all, you don’t have to worry about installing too many freeware (that potentially slow down Windows performance) nor you’ve to watch the video and then locate it from cache folder.
How to extract the hidden direct download link of YouTube video?
With this trick means you could directly download the YouTube video clips to local hard disk!
1) For example, click these links to open the Jumper trailer or the Batman The Dark Knight trailer hosted at YouTube (you could just open any video clips hosted on YouTube) with your favorite web browser.
2) Right-click on the empty / blank place to bring up the web browser context-menu, then click the View Source (IE7) or View Page Source (Firefox 2.0.0.12)
3) Press CTRL+F hotkeys to bring up Find function dialog box and search for
watch_fullscreen4) On the same line, copy all the text from video_id up to title.
E.g. Copy the red-color highlighted text only:
YouTube page source of Batman The Dark Knight trailer:
var fullscreenUrl = '/watch_fullscreen?fs=1&q=batman&e=h&sourceid=ys&video_id=WaIR9dAZRR0&l=127&sk=VCaWxqmJZiKonU1nSiudlwC&t=OEgsToPDskIruDrrzg8rrmEurgby4CAq&hl=en&plid=AARG6hg5eMe3TU0HAAAAoARKYAA&tk=qFuW4Ccd3bcw0maq8nDIEhW4w-HlY7INZ_61k0CTk6utKedGb4Uveg%3D%3D&title=Batman - The Dark Knight Trailer HD';
YouTube page source of the Jumper trailer:
'/watch_fullscreen?fs=1&e=h&video_id=9rz5NekSUTM&l=149&sk=GJ-xz7O9MhF7a9YqeK9xQwC&t=OEgsToPDskJfBx_V8_vxpGb1nnFNj6Ky&hl=en&plid=AARG6j6Dw6RqOq7AAAAAoAAYYAE&title=Jumper Trailer - World Premiere';
5) Open another new browser window, type this URL
www.youtube.com/get_video?and then press CTRL+C keyboard shortcut to APPEND the copied text in step 4.
E.g. these are how the hidden direct download links of YouTube videos look like:
The Jumper Trailer direct download link:
www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=9rz5NekSUTM&l=149&sk=GJ-xz7O9MhF7a9YqeK9xQwC&t=OEgsToPDskJfBx_V8_vxpGb1nnFNj6Ky&hl=en&plid=AARG6j6Dw6RqOq7AAAAAoAAYYAE&title
Batman The Dark Knight Trailer direct download link:
www.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=WaIR9dAZRR0&l=127&sk=VCaWxqmJZiKonU1nSiudlwC&t=OEgsToPDskIruDrrzg8rrmEurgby4CAq&hl=en&plid=AARG6hg5eMe3TU0HAAAAoARKYAA&tk=qFuW4Ccd3bcw0maq8nDIEhW4w-HlY7INZ_61k0CTk6utKedGb4Uveg%3D%3D&title
Now, just press ENTER key and you’ll prompted to save the
get_video file. Before saving the file, you may rename it with a meaningful filename and append the .flv as the flash video file extension.With reference: Lawrence@NextMile
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2012 •
[...] one month ago, I posted a wonderful trick to extract the direct download links of (any) YouTube video. Have you found it useful? The answer is yes and no. (There is always two end, where a solution [...]
There is another(easier) way of doing this, simply create a bookmark with this as the target, then when you want to download a youtube video, click it. You will see a message under the info box “Download as “Mp4″. Right click, and select “download as”. choose a name, and PUT A .mp4 extension on it, or it will not work. then allow it to download, and no need to convert it to another file type. YAY!!!!!!!
[...] low-end, self-made video posted to YouTube, demonstrating how to extract audio music from a video clip with Windows Movie Maker (a video [...]
It doesn’t seem to work anymore, the youtube “getvideo” link is likely to be blocked or dead.
@Glorback, thank you highlighting this.
Thanks, this was great. They seem to have changed things though. This was working as of August 09, 2009, but as of August 12, they seem to have changed the code. video_id= is not in the source anymore.
Hi, I was wondering if anyone knew why youtube video links seem to be generated without any information from http headers including cookies.
You can grab all available direct video links a youtube video page’s source by looking for the keyword ‘fmt_url_map’ as of this comment post’s date. It’s a parameter passed into the flash player that lists all the available video links. The links are seperated using semicolons (;), with each link being escaped. Simply use javascript’s ‘unescape’ function to unescape it. Each link should be composed of two parts, a single number and the link itself seperated by a pipe symbol (|). The number is the format of the video, with 22 being the most common highest quality.
I made a small javascript page app that downloads youtube vids, but the direct links grabbed by the script seem to only work in the browser that requested the page in the script. For example, I’m using chrome and I get the direct link for a youtube vid. I open firefox and attempt to use a download manager for the link to download the lengthy video but I get 403 Forbidden responses. If I go back into chrome I’m able to download the video by pasting it in the address bar. I experimented in firefox and searched for a direct video link, then using a firefox plugin I performed the request with a bare http request header, no cookies, no user agent, nothing, and I keep receiving 403s.
If anyones interested please reply back, I’d like to know what’s the deal with this.
Any chance on an update for this? Haven’t been able to figure it out..