Downloading YouTube videos with TubeTV again

One-line Summary
If the TubeTV download button is disabled in a YouTube video page, refresh the page (Apple+R) and hit the button while it's available.

Whole Story
I use TubeTV to download music videos those funny user-generated videos from YouTube. I've set it to encode the videos for my iPhone, then them directly in my iTunes library, tagged as Music Videos. Amazingly, it was released in early 2008, and it's still avoiding all the crap that has come to YouTube since (annotations, ads). Thank you YouTube for not tampering with the H.264 stream in the Flash files!

I usually wait until the YouTube video loads completely before I hit TubeTV's download button, so I don't download the same bits twice. But, as of recently, I've noticed that the download button becomes disabled at some point during the video's load. I was scared for a second, and thought the days of my easy downloading are over.

After my 2-seconds panic went away, I tried refreshing the page, and the download button was enabled again. The videos are still downloaded, encoded for iPhone, and deposited into iTunes' library just fine.

Closing Thoughts
Too bad TubeTV wasn't open sourced, even though looks like its author abandoned it. One day, it will stop working. Hopefully, something better will be written by then. Or YouTube will start using <video> tags and serve us the H.264 data on a silver platter. And the RIAA / MPAA will let that slide. Right.

Miro: offline Youtube application for Mac

I've been looking for a YouTube front-end application forever, for three reasons:

• the browser isn't integrated with my keyboard's Play / Stop buttons and my apple remote
• YouTube history sucks, as it gets wiped every session
  
• I want to watch all those illegal music videos wonderful user-generated movies offline

Here's what I found so far:


It does concurrent downloads, and tags the unseen videos. This is convenient because I can get multiple variants of the same video, and see / delete the bad dupes. Unfortunately, it doesn't meet my main request -- no integration with the keyboard or apple remote.

Hope this helps people looking for something similar! Please comment if you find something better.

Happy watching,
Victor