Entropy

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Every now and again you come across something on YouTube that you have to have forever. Up until now you had to download the video in the, now common, .flv format. Here’s a website that allows you to add a bookmarklet to grab the video. In case you are not sure what I mean by bookmarklet, it’s essentially a link that will sit in your bookmarks that executes some JavaScript allowing you to download the video. Alternatively, you could install greasemonkey and have it do all the clicking for you.

An interesting side-effect of YouTube’s recent push for higher quality videos is that most videos can be downloaded as MP4 files directly from YouTube. Until now, you could only get FLV files from your browser’s cache or using one of the many websites that let you download YouTube videos. In fact, to download the MP4 files, you need to use the same URL like for FLV files and append “&fmt=18″:

You can find the full guide here.

Youtube, the biggest online source for videos of people doing dumb things has quietly updated their site a little. This includes the addition of stats allowing you to see how people are getting to the video (external links) and a new tab navigation system for deciding what you want to do with the video you are watching.

Techcrunch covers the rest of the story.