Downloading youtube videos to your local machine for offline veiwing is easily on Ubuntu 10.10 with the youtube-dl utility.
Simply open a terminal window and execute:
apt-get update
apt-get install youtube-dl
You can run the command with the url of the youtube video you would like to download e.g
youtube-dl “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbTPKmjHl8”
If the output comes back with the error below you may have to update your copy of youtube-dl.
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Extracting video information
ERROR: unable to download video (format may not be available)
Luckily update process is very easy, simply execute run youtube-dl as a superuser with the -U option.
sudo youtube-dl -U
Updating to latest stable version…
Updated to version github
Chances are you will have to run the command twice, to update it properly on the second run it will output something similar to below:
sudo youtube-dl -U
Updating to latest stable version…
Updated to version 2011.02.25c
Now if you try and grab the video you wanted again you should be successful.
youtube-dl “http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cbTPKmjHl8”
[youtube] Setting language
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Downloading video info webpage
[youtube] 0cbTPKmjHl8: Extracting video information
[download] Destination: 0cbTPKmjHl8.mp4
[download] 100.0% of 24.21M at 192.89k/s ETA 00:00
The file will be save in your current directory and will look something similar to 0cbTPKmjHl8.mp4, you can then open this file up in VLC or movie player to ensure it downloaded correctly.