YOUTUBE VIDEO DOWNLOAD TRICK

For command line lovers only.

Once youtube-dl is installed, all you need to do is :

$ youtube-dl http://youtu.be/7M-jsjLB20Y
 Setting language
 7M-jsjLB20Y: Downloading video webpage
 7M-jsjLB20Y: Downloading video info webpage
 7M-jsjLB20Y: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: 7M-jsjLB20Y.flv
[download] 100.0% of 1.99M at   30.68k/s ETA 00:00

So you can see that the command youtube-dl followed by a youtube URL was all that was required to download the video. Now you can open it with any command line video player like VLC and enjoy the video.

youtube-dl is a feature rich utility, you can also download video in another format. All you need to use is -f option of this utility. Here is what the man page of this utility has to say about -f option :

-f FMT, –format=FMT
Specify the video format (quality) in which to download the video.

For youtube.com, in particular, the meaning of the format codes is given as:

WebM video at 480p: 43
WebM video at 720p: 45
H264 video in MP4 container at 480p: 18
H264 video in MP4 container at 720p: 22
H264 video in MP4 container at 1080p: 37
H264 video in FLV container at 360p: 34
H264 video in FLV container at 480p: 35
H263 video at 240p: 5
3GP video: 17

For more options, see the man page of youtube-dl.