Save YouTube Videos

In my neverending quest to compile sports videos that I only seem to enjoy, YouTube has always been a great tease - Many videos to watch, but none to download for offline viewing. I did some googling and found a pretty simple way to save videos. There are other methods out there, but this works for me.

1. Find the YouTube video you want to save and cut the page's URL.
2. Paste the address in http://keepvid.com and select "download".
3. In a few second, you'll be given a link for downloading. Right-click and select "save as...". Title the file whatever you want, but ensure you add ".flv" to the name. Hit save and the download starts (of course!).
4. Now that you've got your file, you'll need an FLV player/encoder. I like Riva's FLV program.
5. Once installed, all saved FLV files will play (in a small, non-resizeable window) on your computer. Since it's a small window, I suggest changing the format into something more usable like MPEG because it doesn't seem to like WMV.
   
6. Open the encoder that was also installed and select the FLV file. In the "Output" file name box, change the extension to ".mpeg" and hit "Encode". I don't know enough to mess with the default settings, so I don't touch'em.
   
7. Though the program will dim and look frozen, it'll eventually "unfreeze" and you'll have a YouTube video on your hard drive. There seems to be a slight quality loss, but at least you've got your video now.