YouTube video offline mode

Recently I enrolled to AI class online course. Each week they submit dozen of explanatory and Q&A videos on youtube and reference them from AI-class site. As I mostly have time to study those videos when I'm offline I've decided to explore possibilities of getting videos to local computer for offline viewing. Purpose of this post is just to summarize steps which I did in order to achieve this goal on linux.


Get tools

First thing first, I had to equip myself with tools.

youtube-dl
After unsuccessful attempt to use clive/cclive, I decided to use youtube-dl which you can download at github project page. Although it is single purpose youtube only downloader it works and does exactly what I need. You need python interpreter to run it.
grake
Grake is utility to parse youtube links out of HTML and it's hosted at code.google.com. Grake is Perl module, but installation is straightforward, as one only has to follow instructions in INSTALL file.


Get list of videos
First step is using youtube.com to find playlist of videos. For example I've just typed 'AI class unit9 videos' to google/youtube to get this link: 'http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9163DC3C43AF7612'.


Next step is to download list using Grake and edit it

$ cd ~/Videos/Unit9
$ grake http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9163DC3C43AF7612 < Unit9.lst

Downloaded file looks like:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries
http://youtube.com/watch?v=DgH6NaJHfVQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9D35JSWSJAg
http://youtube.com/watch?v=9QMZQkKuYjo
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YfSBYf9h7qk
...

I've just deleted first line using vim.


Get videos
Last step is to get the videos by using youtube-dl. I've used this:

$ cat Unit9.lst | xargs youtube-dl -tA

With -tA options I told downloader to use video name as filename instead of funky hash and autoprefix it with number as it's downloaded.