The following are the best and easiest ways to free download the YouTube videos from Safari browser in Mac.
Method 1. Free Download YouTube videos via Safari Activity window
This is one of the easiest ways to download the YouTube video from Safari browser. Just open Safari, and then browse to the YouTube video which you want to download. You can use either keystrokes Command-Option-A or paths Safari: Window - Activity. Look at activity from YouTube.com and then search for the biggest file size which is obviously the video file. Safari will open its Downloads Window and start downloading the file you double-clicked on as "videoplayback.flv".
Tips: The downloaded YouTube video is available only in .flv mode, and not any other. So if you want to have it optimized for your iPhone or iPod, you would need a YouTube video converter for that.
Method 2. Free Download YouTube videos via Safari Extension
With the release of the new Safari browser version 5.0, the availability of extensions and its installation is possible now. To spot and download YouTube video with Safari extension on Mac, Go to the Preferences in the Safari browser, and then open the "Advanced" section. There you would see an option of "Show Develop Menu in Menu Bar" at the bottom. Mark that option.
After that, you would see a Develop section in the top menu, in which you need to select the option of "Enable Extensions" which will help you enable the usage of extensions in the browser. Download the extension which named "Dropdown" from the list, then reopen your safari, after the video page opens in YouTube. You can get easy options for downloading videos from YouTube in Safari browser.
Method 3. Free Download YouTube videos via Safari bookmarklets
There is a safari bookmarklet which you can place in your toolbar, to just click and start the download of the video, when the video is being loaded. It will lead you to a link of mp4 version download. Drag this below bookmarklet link to your toolbar - Get YouTube video.
Whenever you want to download any YouTube video, simply click on the above bookmarklet when you are on the YouTube page for the video you want to download. The video gets automatically downloaded as a high resolution MP4 video on to your PC. If you found using Safari to download YouTube is not stable enough, then iFunia Free YouTube Downloader for Mac is a totally FREE yet all-in-one YouTube video downloader for Mac OS.
Convert the YouTube videos to other video format on Mac
For Mac users who want to take the downloaded YouTube video on the go or view it with iTunes, there is one more step that must be taken to accomplish this. To convert the downloaded YouTube video you can download iFunia YouTube converter for Mac to download and convert YouTube video on Mac for iPod, iPhone, QuickTime, MKV, MP3 etc. See the detailed tutorial here.
