YouTube in MP4 via QuickTime Plugin!
Today I saw this link on Daring Fireball that presents a bookmarklet to add a link to the YouTube page to download a (higher quality) MP4 version of the video you’re viewing. This is great, but I dislike flash in general, so I’d rather not even watch the embedded version to begin with. I’ve crafted the following bookmarklet to replace the existing flash player with an embedded QuickTime player for the MP4 file. Go try it out on YouTube.
To install the bookmarklet, simply drag it to your Bookmarks Bar (in Firefox, Safari):
This has only been tested on a Mac. I expect it won’t work on some other OSes because it uses the <embed> tag rather than the <object> tag. I encourage someone fix up this bookmarklet to work on other platforms by using the <object> tag, and condense it a little–because it is rather long. I’d be happy to post an updated version if someone improves it. Additionally, a GreaseKit script would be great too.
Enjoy!
Update:
Seems to work in Firefox on Windows.
Works perfectly for me. I tried it on this amazing video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiNBqEk-bRk
Comment by Erik Hinterbichler — April 16, 2008 @ 4:26 pm
Erik,
That plug was not obvious at all!
Comment by Joey — April 16, 2008 @ 5:19 pm
joey, you constantly bring the hotness. thank you.
Comment by afoursquarecurse — April 16, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
doesn’t work for me! safari, leopard, um….aluminum keyboard
Comment by david stolarsky — April 16, 2008 @ 6:04 pm
David,
Which video did you use it on? Not all YouTube videos are available in MP4. If you get a big Q with a question mark, the video simply isn’t available in MP4.
-Joey
Comment by Joey — April 16, 2008 @ 6:06 pm
hi joey,
love the plugin! great work.
Comment by despa — April 17, 2008 @ 4:20 am
It’s not working for me. I get the Quicktime “Q” logo where the video is supposed to play but after a couple minutes it just puts a question mark over it and doesn’t load!
I did the manual “&fmt=18″ to the address and the video played fine, but not with the bookmarklet.
Comment by Shawn — April 24, 2008 @ 10:32 am
Doesn’t work for me in Safari 3.1.1, using this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQP7ASBdwdo
It is available in High Quality, but all I get is a blank area where the video should be, or a crash.
Mulder
Comment by Mulder — April 24, 2008 @ 11:23 am
Same problem here. I wait until the YouTube video loads and tryed with the bookmarklet but I get the Quicktime “Q” logo
Comment by c.urdaneta — April 24, 2008 @ 11:47 am
Shawn and Mulder,
I also have the same problem with that video, the Q?– but it is not clear to me at this point which videos are having this problem, it may be related to the MIME type? Hopefully we’ll be able to fix it soon.
The crash is more concerning; I have not been able to make the bookmarklet crash my browser in any way. Mulder, do you have any additional Safari plugins (like GreaseKit) installed?
Comment by Joey — April 24, 2008 @ 11:58 am
@Joey,
I have 1Password, amiScript (for Camino), Inquisitor, SafariScript, SafariStand, and Smart Crash Reports for Input Managers.
For Internet Plugins, I have the usual assortment for web browsers like Adobe Reader plugin, Java, Adobe Flash, etc.; nothing exotic or strange.
Mulder
Comment by Mulder — April 24, 2008 @ 12:52 pm
Running 1Password and iGlasses on Safari 3.1.1 - all I get is the Q and nothing else. No question mark, nothing. Do I wait for the Flash version to load first before hitting the bookmarklet?
Comment by Rom — April 24, 2008 @ 5:29 pm
Rom,
That sounds like its just still loading; it takes longer than the flash version. Does this happen consistently on many videos, or just a couple? If none of this works, I need to suggest you try the standard things like; 1) new web browser, 2) try new user account, etc.
Love to hear an update if you get it working.
Comment by Joey — April 24, 2008 @ 5:34 pm
Thanks, Joey! It finally worked! :) Yeah, it was loading both plug-in and the video, I guess.
Now, I am blogging about this and expect some traffic going your way. :)
Comment by Rom — April 24, 2008 @ 5:43 pm
Rom, Cool, i’m glad to hear its working. Thanks!
Comment by Joey — April 24, 2008 @ 5:47 pm
Great work Joey!
Comment by Paul Nowak — April 25, 2008 @ 7:23 am
You can also simply set high quality at http://www.youtube.com/video_quality_settings
Comment by Martin — April 25, 2008 @ 9:37 am
This is wonderful. It worked exactly as advertised on the first piece of useless dreck I tried it on. No stuttery buffering, and amazing video quality. Those friends who IM me nothing but YouTube links just got a LOT more tolerable.
In all seriousness, THANK YOU.
Comment by kostia — April 25, 2008 @ 10:11 pm
Thanks so much for this - so far works great in Safari and Firefox. Don’t mean to be greedy, but any ideas as to how to now get full-screen video (as we can with the inferior flash player)?
Comment by Ed — April 27, 2008 @ 7:14 am
Hi, how can iknow if a video is available in high quality?
Comment by Ivan — April 27, 2008 @ 10:51 am
Ed, the QuickTime plugin doesn’t have a fullscreen feature. I think with some work you could make a resizable player with a popup window and javascript, but i’m not sure how much would fit in a bookmarklet. I made one that fits the width of the page, or height of the browser window, but unfortunately it covers up part of the YouTube page. Perhaps with some fancier CSS this could be fixed as well?
QTYouTube (big)
Comment by Joey — April 27, 2008 @ 12:32 pm
Ivan,
Unfortunately, I don’t know of a good way to reliably determine this.
Comment by Joey — April 27, 2008 @ 12:33 pm
Works fine on Arch Linux + Firefox, with Totem plugin (xine backend). Infact it works better than quicktime on mac because it will play non-mp4 regular flash videos too instead of showing the question mark ;-)
Comment by Prashant Vaibhav — April 27, 2008 @ 2:48 pm