Windows; 
Mac; 
Linux 
Sometimes it’s nice to download a video from a site so that you can watch it at your leisure without needing to be connected to the Internet. There are online services that will automatically do the video download/conversion for you, but sometimes the turnaround can be a little slow (or there just isn’t the level of customization you want).
xVideoServiceThief is a free cross-platform (and open source) app that can handle downloading videos from over 70 different online video sources. You can also configure it so that all downloads are automatically converted to one of seven different formats.
Here’s an overview of the features:
- Download Videos from a lot of Web Video Services: YouTube, Yahoo, Google Videos, Metacafe, etc…
- Convert videos to AVI, MPEG1, MPEG2, WMV, MP4, 3GP, MP3.
- Download almost any video from internet via HTTP and RTMP protocols.
- Configure your own download schedules and let the xVST to download your videos when you are not using your computer!
- Download more than one video at the same time.
- Pause, resume or cancel your downloads.
- Search videos inside the xVST and download (or play) them!
- Drop video links directly to the xVideoServiceThief.
- Save and Restore your download lists automatically.
For most casual video watchers this will probably be overkill, but this may be right up your alley if you like to have your own personal library of movie clips.
xVideoServiceThief Homepage (Windows, Mac, Linux; Freeware)
This looks good. I’ve been using Dirpy ([dirpy.com]) for ‘ripping’ audio out of YouTube videos. I think it will also allow you to download the videos.
To add to above comment since I cain’t seem to edit, I rip to an MP3 file and again I believe there are other audio options as well with [dirpy.com]
Does it allow you to choose which quality (720p, 1080p, etc.) to download the video at?
Odd, I can’t even login now. Anyway had a chance to play with this today and after some trial and error got it working. I am using it to convert YouTube to MP3. The problem I ran into in the beginning was it was not doing to conversion (even though it was setup to do so), it would just download an .FLV file so I had to find a utility which would convert offline .FLV files to .MP3. After shutting down the application and restarting it did the conversion on all the new videos I added. I love the Drag & Drop Window feature, simply grab the link for the video and drag it into the window to start the conversion. No having to copy and paste URLs.
Well, that is odd it logged me in. Anyway great find on this application. Especially since Dirpy is having issues again.
i using [tubekeeper.com] to download Youtube and CollegeHumor videos…