I recently came across an interesting web tool: voobys.com. I’ve tried out its service for YouTube video downloads — the procedure is pretty brilliant.
Say I wanted to download the video in http://youtube.com/watch?v=F2TSy0Z5qTEw. I’d just have to replace the string “youtube” (as in “youtube.com”) in the URI with “voobys” (for “voobys.com”) and go to that URI. For this example, the resulting URI would be http://voobys.com/watch?v=F2TSy0Z5qTEw. This page will then contain a hyperlink with which I could download the video.
Convenient, portable, and easy to remember. A pretty creative solution, huh. There is a potential issue with terms of use, but that’s another topic.