Download YouTube Videos with QtTube

According to the Alexa traffic rankings, YouTube is the fourth most popular website in the world, behind only Yahoo, MSN and Google. Is it any wonder that YouTube, home of homemade, viral, funny, scary and utterly bizarre videos is such a popular destination?

Early on, many YouTube aficionados made their desire to archive YouTube videos clear, and numerous Firefoxextensions were born. These extensions were able to get into the "guts" of a video's YouTube page and find the actual URL for the Flash video, and download it onto the computer user's hard drive. In this manner, even if the video later disappeared from YouTube, that user would have a copy of it.

But those utilities have often been for Windows or Mac users, or for users of the Firefox web browser. What about Linux users who don't use Firefox? Are there any options for them?

There is now.

A handy little tool, recently released, called QtTube, is here to save the day. QtTube is a simple utility with a single purpose - download the Flash video from any YouTube page. It is currently only available for Linux users, but as the Qt toolkit is apparently in the process of being ported to Mac and Windows, there exists the possibility that QtTube may someday be available for those platforms as well.

How does it work? Easy. All you need is the URL to a YouTube video and you're good to go! So, if someone sent you a link, or if you're already on the YouTube page, great. If not, simply start up your web browser and navigate to YouTube. Do a search for whatever you want. When you've found a video you want, just go up to your web browser's address bar and copy the entire address. There's no need to worry about the embed code that YouTube provides. We don't need it.

Now, start up QtTube. It's called QtTube, by the way, because it uses the Qt toolkit (which is what KDE uses, in case you're interested). Because of this, the fonts and widgets/buttons might look a bit different from the rest of your desktop (especially if you're using Gnome), but the program works great. Once QtTube is started, all you need to do is paste the URL to the YouTube video. Find a spot on your hard drive where you want to download the video, and click to start the download process.

Depending on your preferences, the QtTube window may now expand slightly, to show you the download progress bar (or the progress bar might have already been there). Depending on how fast YouTube is at this point, the download might be done in a matter of seconds, or a couple minutes might be needed.

Once the download is finished, you can grab more YouTube videos to download, following the same procedure, or else you can shut it off and go watch what you just downloaded. One note: you'll probably want to give the video a name that means something, since they'll likely be downloaded with names made up of long strings of letters and numbers.

In my short time using QtTube, it's worked beautifully. The speed seems fine, and while there aren't a lot of features that I feel are missing, there are a couple. For one, it would be nice if QtTube could actually perform YouTube searches itself, which would negate the need to fire up a web browser. It would also be wonderful if searches could be queued. As it is, if you have a handful of videos to download, you need to wait for one to finish before starting another. It would be great to simply enter in all the different URLs you have, start the whole downloading process, and walk away. As it is, if I want to download five videos, I have to monitor QtTube so I know when one has finished, just so I can paste in the next URL and start it downloading.

Still, QtTube is currently very new, and who knows... by the time you try it out, it may have even more great features. QtTube is open-source, and can be downloaded at the project's home page or at GetDeb, for Ubuntu users.