[conspire] apt-get install youtube-dl

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):

> Just did a fresh setup of Linux on a personal laptop,
> and want to point out a helpful package for going
> without Flash if you watch YouTube videos.
> 
> It's called "youtube-dl" -- home page is here:
>   http://rg3.github.com/youtube-dl/
> but you should be able to get it with "apt-get install
> youtube-dl" or "yum install youtube-dl".

It's one of the two main solutions of that type (along with clive or its
recent rewrite cclive).  I've documented the various options here:

'YouTube Downloading' on http://linuxmafia.com/kb/Web

As I mention on that page, this app category deals not only with YouTube
but also a variety of other sites that attempt to obscure using
deliberately tortuous Javascript the download link for a video clip so
that you, the user, are tricked into doing real-time streaming of the
clip only, and never end up with a local copy that you might be able to
view any time at your leisure.

By dealing with the obscuring Javascript wrapper, youtube-dl and friends 
finesse the only part of playing YouTube videos that has ever been
challenging for Linux, thus permitting you to be perfectly happy with
Gnash or swfdec rather than Adobe's proprietary Flash interpreter,
_plus_ you get to retain independent local copies of video clips if you
wish.