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.
Update:
Comment from Kris below provides a Greasemonkey/GreaseKit Userscript.
Userscript
Update:
Comment from Jean below suggests enlarging the size of the video to accommodate the new wider YouTube format. I’ve done this to the link above, but kept the format at “18″, as “22″ is still not widely available.
Update:
Jean was also kind enough to let me host this very informative chart (pdf) of precisely the file sizes, quality, and formats of all downloading format numbers that he made. Lots of info here!
Update:
See ClickToFlash 1.4+ supports H.264 loading to automatically load H.264 video for YouTube.
Update:
A reader has come up with a Safari 5 Extension that replaces the functionality of this bookmarklet. If you are using Safari 5, please consider using the plugin instead: FlashToHTML5.