You need to be online to watch a video from YouTube. It also supports buffering. That’s the video can be buffered when connected to the internet and watched offline. (This has helped me to watch so many videos when I’m not connected). But the pain part is if you close the browser, the buffered content is lost. You again have to connect to internet to watch the same video clip.

    Why not we download it and have it offline? I googled and found some websites that provide this service. You tell them the video you need, they give you the download link after sometime. You can download it. But you get this service at the cost of advertisements and annoying popups. There is a plug-in available for Firefox users. Still IE users don’t have any options. All I wanted was to download many video clips in a single shot. The only option was to code myself!

    I chose VBscript as I don’t need any more software installation necessary for this to run. Almost all the Windows comes with the scripting support. Hence I can run my VBscript anywhere even in the Cyber-cafes. It supports two switches currently. Either I can directly supply the list of URLs of videos I want when I’m calling it or I can provide a text file with list of URLs. Something like

When you call the script with ‘U’ switch you can provide the URLs directly. Something like

YT_DL.VBS U http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMYw8SodMWQ, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRMyR8BJ74A

When you call the script with ‘F’ switch you can just provide a path to text file which contains the list of URLs

    YT_DL.VBS F url_list.txt

    The main advantage of the script is that you can just create a list of videos you want and put in a text file and pass it on to the script with ‘F’ switch. It downloads and saves them in the same folder with the title of the videos as the file names. You are done with a single command. No waiting, No popup and it can run on your background. You need not even bother about it.

    Please note, when you running this script for the first time, you will (most probably) get an error message stating, “msxml3.dll: Access is denied”. Don’t worry, it’s a security catch. You need to add http://youtube.com to your list of trusted sites. For this go to the ‘Internet options àSecurity tabà select Trusted and click the ‘Sites..’ button. There you add http://youtube.com. Now run your script. You won’t have any issues.

    Once downloaded, you can play those .FLV files using FLV players available over the web for free. You can download one from here. Hope you find this script useful. You can use it and modify it in the way you want. If you have any issues or suggestions, please let me know. Have fun and do share your comments here.

The script can be downloaded here.