utube/google video..

There's a number of sites. I guarantee you that in less time than it took you to write that post, you could have Googled for "download YouTube videos" and gotten your answer. Still, they're going to be pretty junky files. No hi-res stuff.

The usual site for this (http://www.javimoya.com) appears to be down right now, but there's also http://www.youtubex.com/ and several others. Also there's TubeSock for OSX.

 

speaking of which...

I've used this sevice for a while, but I can't PLAY any videos! What do you guys use?

 

This is the best site I've found that downloads the videos the fastest: http://www.videodl.org/

And you need to get Perian, which allows you to play almost any format in Quicktime.

 

This is the neatest way to grab FLV files off Youtube that I've seen yet. You just drag it to your bookmarks bar and pull it down whenever you're looking at a Youtube video you want to keep. You still need to deal with conversion afterward, but there's less fiddling with copy/paste etc.