Saving YouTube Videos on the iPhone

I've been storing videos from YouTube on my iPhone.

Why bother? We can play YouTube videos directly from the network. Ah, but what about those times when a network connection is not available?

It has happened to me while travelling by air and there are certain areas where I get little or no signal at all. Try connecting to YouTube from deep inside one of those 30 story office buildings where there is so much RF interference that your watch runs backwards. Even worse, what if one of your favorite videos gets kicked off YouTube due to a "policy violation"? Then it's gone forever.

Downloading videos from YouTube and storing them on your iPhone (or iPod, iNano, etc) is all done with free software. You will need:

1. The Firefox browser. You can get Firefox free here.
2. The Fast Video Download extension for Firefox which is free here.
3. The free FLV to MP4 converter available from dvdvideosoft.com

There may be other programs that claim to do these sorts of things. The ones I've picked out above are free, have no viruses or spyware, ads, etc. and are easy to use. Here is the procedure:

1. Install the software listed above.
   
2. In the Firefox browser, go to YouTube and choose the video you wish to download.
3. Click the "Download Video" icon at the bottom right corner of the Firefox screen.
   
   



4. When the download is complete, launch the DVDVideoSoft converter and convert the downloaded video to the MP4 format.
   
   



5. Launch iTunes, select File->Add to Library and then select the converted file.
   
6. In iTunes, synch the Movies section to your iPhone

That's it. Here is a mirror of the Firefox add-on and the converter you can use in case any of the links above go south. Now I am going to go watch Lita Ford sing Kiss Me Deadly on my iPhone.