As of April 2nd, 2010 youTube has changed their code so that you can't download 720p & 1080p videos anymore. Has anyone found a workaround? 
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Downloading 720p & 1080p HD YouTube videos disabled?
- Thread starter lexurious18
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As of April 2nd, 2010 youTube has changed their code so that you can't download 720p & 1080p videos anymore. Has anyone found a workaround?
Could you provide some detail on what method you are using to download the videos? MPEG Streamclip? Realplayer? It could easily be a glitch in your program.
Open HD video page in Safari.
Open Activity window.
Find URL of video (the one that's multi-megabytes long and probably still downloading as you're looking through the URL list.
Select the URL.
Option-double-click to download the file.
(Edit - I did the below steps initially before I realized there was a much shorter way to do it!)
Hit Edit|Copy.
Open Terminal window.
Type the following:
curl "<cmd-v>" > video.mp4
Wait as the video file is downloaded into your home directory and named "video.mp4" (or whatever you want to call it).
Open Activity window.
Find URL of video (the one that's multi-megabytes long and probably still downloading as you're looking through the URL list.
Select the URL.
Option-double-click to download the file.
(Edit - I did the below steps initially before I realized there was a much shorter way to do it!)
Open Terminal window.
Type the following:
curl "<cmd-v>" > video.mp4
Wait as the video file is downloaded into your home directory and named "video.mp4" (or whatever you want to call it).
Did you try double clicking in the activity window while holding the option/alt key? Try that.
I used to be able to do this with a bookmarklet in Safari. I would click on the bookmarklet and all the sizes choices (ex. mp4, 720p, 1080p if the video was available in those sizes) would show up. Now those bookmarklets don't work. Has anyone made a new bookmarklet that does? I can't find one anywhere....
Another option is to use ClickToFlash, which is a free flash blocker with a Youtube H.264 redirector and includes a download option if you right click on the H.264 video object.
As of two days ago, it seems to be disabled for me. And even worse, now adding " &fmt=18 " to the URL, which would change it to the original quality and download in .mp4 format through the activity window... now it downloads .flv no matter what.. can anyone help?