PyTube - a YouTube Downloader and Converter for Linux

YouTube is one of the amazing Internet success stories of the last few years. When it was introduced, Google Video and Yahoo Video were the top two video websites on the Internet, but it only took a few months before YouTube became more popular - by far - than the other two websites, combined.

YouTube is popular for a few reasons, chief among them being that YouTube enables regular folks to share their home videos, be they vacation videos or a video blog, with the world. You don't need to know anything about setting up a website for yourself, nor do you need to worry about a domain name, bandwidth restrictions, or any of that. Simply set up an account, convert your video to the correct format, and upload it. Very soon, your content can be seen around the world.

And there's a ton of good stuff on YouTube, so much good stuff that people want to share it. Of course, YouTube doesn't necessarily want you to do that. YouTube makes its money off advertising revenue, so each time someone clicks on your video, YouTube gets a little cash. If people were able to download the video from YouTube, then a tiny part of YouTube's revenue stream disappears.

Of course, people have figured out how to download just the video. There are quite a few utilities for this, and you can even install a Firefox extension that allows you to download a YouTube video (and videos from many other video sharing websites), with only a couple clicks.

The problem with many of these is that YouTube, and other websites, keep their videos stored as Flash Video files. These filse aren't that common, and since most people don't have a Flash Video player on their hard drive, once downloaded the file is oftentimes a bit useless. There are programs, such as MPlayer and VLC that can play Flash Video, but it would be great if there was an easy way to download and convert all those YouTube videos, in a single step, right?