Most people usually get browser plugins or online video downloader services to download videos from youtube or other video sharing sites, but more often than not I found them to be highly unreliable. It’s a hit and misses, sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. I have found these two terminal downloaders to be much more reliable and they are much faster than any browser plugin you will ever use.

Movegrab

movgrab is a downloader for all those pesky sites that insist you use a big fat browser that runs flash to see their content. It’s a command-line app written in straight C, and so doesn’t require you to install Perl. Nor ruby. Nor python. Nor guile, scheme, glib, gtk, qt, gnome, KDE, X-windows, m4, firefox, or windows. No! Not any of that! It should compile on all POSIX Unix systems.

Download the latest tarball from their site.

 wget https://sites.google.com/site/columscode/files/movgrab-1.1.10.tgz

Unpack tarball:

tar -xvf movgrab-1.1.10.tgz

make and install from source:

./configure
make
make install

Downloading a video is as simple as:

movgrab http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J4vr16HvkI

get-flash-videos

Download videos from various Flash-based video hosting sites, without having to use the Flash player. Handy for saving videos for watching offline, and means you don’t have to keep upgrading Flash for sites that insist on a newer version of the player.

Using get-flash-videos is as simple as downloading the latest deb package from their site and installing a package. No need for compiling for your system.

Download package (ubuntu/debian):

wget http://get-flash-videos.googlecode.com/files/get-flash-videos_1.24-1_all.deb

Install with dpkg (you might have to install perl packages first, but the installer will let you know):

sudo dpkg -i get-flash-videos_1.24-1_all.deb

Downloading videos is as simple as:

get_flash_videos "http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J4vr16HvkI"