I'm actually interested in this one myself.
*Quality

Awarding eric3579 with one star point for this contribution to VideoSift - declared quality by Barseps.

savemedia.com (and lots of similar sites) allow you to paste a YouTube URL and it will allow you to direct-download the video (and audio) files.

Once you have those on your computer, you can use VirtualDub to save as an AVI file.

Links please.

savemedia.com (this one was obvious, I think )

virtualdub.org (open source awesomeness)

Tried savemedia and a few others earlier and it doesn't seem to work. The others I had tried mentioned the length being to long savemedia just errored http://youtube.com/watch?v=30gEiweaAVQ

Bummer. Sorry to hear that. (I've never tried a very long file before.)

I've no experience with any desktop applications that fetch YouTube videos, but there's probably something like that out there.

Googling reveals a few results. Here's what's at the top of the search results.

You'll have to use Firefox:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/

Then convert using:
http://www.pazera-software.com/

I use that plug-in, and it generally works well.

You don't have to convert to avi to watch the saved vids, there are stand-alone flash players, and I think vlc will do it too. In fact it might be possible to do the whole download with vlc, but I haven't tried it.

id like it in avi so i can burn to a dvd and watch on a dvd player.

I use a userscript called Youtube Center. It allows you to download the videos in mp4, flv, webm and 3gp formats. You need to have Greasemonkey or Scriptish installed on Firefox to use userscripts. I don't know about other browsers.

I'm oldschool: JDownloader.

Works like a charm with file lockers and video hosts.

I just use a downloader (e.g., movgrab in Linux/Debian and Orbit Downloader in Windows) and then manually convert with free MediaCoder (Windows).

Other web sites (never used them after bookmarking heh):
http://keep-tube.com/
http://keepvid.com/
http://deturl.com/

I use this: http://www.dvdvideosoft.com/products/dvd/Free-YouTube-Download.htm

It's a free program that downloads and converts YouTube videos, without any length limit.

Exactly what i was looking for. Thanks everyone for your suggestions

Can I give an answer that doesn't fit the original question? Instead of converting them why not just download them in original form and install VLC media player? It can play EvErYtHiNg you can throw at it and then some. No loss of quality or increase in file size because of conversion.

If that is an acceptable answer then if you use firefox install the VideoDownloadHelper plugin which can create a little greyed out icon on your status bar. When a supported video is detected on the currently active page it will become a colored animated icon where you can download the file.


OTHERWISE install the VideoDownloadHelper and use its built in conversion on the fly ability

VideoDownloadHelper + VLC = best como for me.