YouTube is full of videos that would be great to show your class. Unfortunately, it’s also home to some seedy stuff… so most districts see fit to ban it from their school network.

If only you could save the movie to your hard drive (or flash drive, these days) and play it back whenever you wanted. Then you wouldn’t have to go through the YouTube site, nor would you have to worry about the district filter.

You Can Download YouTube Movies?

Well, not easily.  YouTube movies are stored as Flash Movie files (*.flv) on the YouTube server. In theory, these should be easy enough to grab and download.

However, YouTube doesn’t load the movie directly – because they don’t want you to have access to it. The developers of YouTube created a special script (which creates the movie player, the related videos, etc) that fetches the appropriate movie for you. This prevents you from simply saving the movie the way you would an image.

Despite these precautions, there is now a quick and easy way to download these movie files, though. It involves some free software, and it is (near as I can tell) legal.

Get RealPlayer

First, you’ll need to get RealPlayer. This is a free media player (similar to Windows Media Player). Before the advent of flash videos (and sites like YouTube), RealPlayer was used to play specialized movie files that were created according to its format.

In the most recent version of RealPlayer, they added a feature whereby you could easily download and store any Flash movies that you see on the Internet. It’ll hook up to your Browser (at this time, it works with Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox, but not Google Chrome) and any time you right click on a Flash movie you’ll see the option, “Download This Video to RealPlayer.”  If you roll your mouse over the video, a “Download this Video” button will also appear in the top right (see the screenshot to the right).

Now go back to YouTube, find the video you want to share with your students, and download the video. From there, you can move the file to your Flash drive and transport it to school.

You’ll also need to install a media player on your school computer that is capable of playing Flash movies. You could install RealPlayer on your computer at school. Or ycould get another free program, FLVPlayer, to play the movies back.

I use flvplayer at school because it puts less load on the computer, and my school computer isn’t exactly brand new.

Why Doesn’t YouTube Just Let You Download Videos?

Because they want to make money…

YouTube generates income through advertising when you are watching movies.  If you download movies and watch them off-site, they won’t be able to make money.

Should this concern you?  That’s a sticky situation.

I don’t care much about YouTube.  They don’t own the copyrights to the movies, nor should they have the exclusive right to distribute and use them.  In some cases, the owner of the movie may make some income through YouTube’s advertising revenue.

In that case, downloading the video to play offline could cost the producer money, and it could be considered a violation of copyright law.  As long as you’re just showing it in class, though, I wouldn’t consider it too harmful.  Years ago, you’d tape stuff on TV – now you borrow something from YouTube.

Do remember, though, that the movie you downloaded does belong to someone.  Don’t distribute or sell it, as that would be extremely unethical and illegal.