Brilliant! My wife sometimes shows Youtube clips in her psych classes, but the classroom internet is unreliable. She tries to use tubesock to nab them, but that fails more than it works.
To be clear, the url should be something like //www.pwnyoutube.com/....
I've been using Applian Media Catcher http://www.applian.com/replay-media-catcher/ to capture videos for teachers at my school for a while now. It's not free, but it works with a lot of sites besides YouTube.
I sent this info to my sister. She teaches science in a high school and the school's Internet filter blocks all access to YouTube, so she was thrilled to learn about this.
For the past few years I've been using the youtube-dl Python script to download youtube videos on my 64-bit linux box (thanks for dropping the ball on a 64-bit flash player Adobe ... thankfully GNU gnash has become more stable recently).
It's not great, but I've had fewer problems with it than with a 32-bit build with nspluginwrapper. I use flashblock, so it's not really a problem for me.
This is really well executed. Coming up with a bookmarklet is straightforward too. For example, for the international site you could use javascript:location.href='http://pwn'+location.href.substring(11). Of course, this can be refined to handle the presence or lack of www and international prefixes (e.g., ca.youtube.com), but you get the idea.
Determining the video url is done on pwnyoutube's server and they can set whatever referrer (or none) they like. The real question is whether Youtube will start checking the request ip address and block pwnyoutube's. But then just put the site in a cloud.
My experience is that Youtube combats this (either intentionally or just by way of code changes) by changing the method in which the flv urls are determined by the player. The download sites break until they reverse engineer, and the cycle continues.
considering youtube is starting to add their own download links (http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/01/19/youtube-begins-addin...) and there are already tons of sites and utilities to download them already that haven't been blocked, i'd say youtube doesn't really care.
Those who want their sites/products to go mainstream without ridicule (ExpertSexChange.com/ExpertsExchange.com is a popular example) or false negative impression/bias. This is why people often spend a lot of time to choose a name carefully, especially when you consider the long-term branding and marketing.
this is something I've never understood about DRM. If I can watch/listen to it I can capture it. Period. DRM is supposed to simply make the barrier to piracy higher so that less people overall pirate.
But this is a total misunderstanding about how piracy works. Someone will take up the challenge of breaking your DRM, and when they do everyone will download it from that person and then each other. DRM is completely ineffective in a situation where a single point of failure means total failure.
Indeed, and they're popular, too. If you type "youtube" into Google's search, the number one suggestion in the Ajax autocompletion box is "youtube downloader".
This is perfect feature that I have missed ever since I switched from Firefox(and its many great extensions) to Chrome. On the down side, I've had a lot of crashes recently when downloading large files in Chrome.
To be clear, the url should be something like //www.pwnyoutube.com/....