Saving Google and Youtube Video’s to Disk!
A friend of mine maintains a site called www.lifeofexile.com/wget_curl/ and posted a VERY interesting article in 2006 that I seem to have missed. Whether this method still works I do not know, but usually his stuff always works and continues to so I thought I’d add this little gem for all to see and you can all let me know how you get on with it! *evil laugh*..
It’s pretty easy shellscript - all you need is a linux box and you should be away. 
Azio
“As we all know, Google recently purchased Youtube . Unfortunately, as a result of that decision, Google has now become the target of a wide range of lawsuits forcing YouTube to remove a lot of the Copyrighted content which has been stored on the YouTube servers. What’s unfortunate is that the content is not limited in scope to videos which were uploaded by people for the sake of creativity (i.e. videos with copyrighted songs in them) or to content such as Cartoons which have been long out of print.
To make a long story short, I was browsing Metafilter and in one of the threads I came along a wget that was posted by a member there. I hope they don’t mind me sharing it here, for all to benefit. The following will allow you to save your favorite videos from Youtube and play them back later:
“wget -O - ‘http://youtube.com/get_video.php?’`wget -qO - ‘http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=phO3Nubtgds’ | grep player2.swf | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\†-f1` > whatever.flv
or slightly easier to use in script form:
#!/bin/bash
baseurl=’http://youtube.com/get_video.php?’
pageurl=$1
wget -O - $baseurl`wget -qO - $pageurl | grep player2.swf | cut -d? -f2 | cut -d\†-f1`
Make sure you redirect stdout to a file.”