PwnYouTube: A three letter solution to downloading YouTube videos

Downloading YouTube videos for personal offline use can be a pain to do, especially since you have to download and install software or find some janky site to do do the hard work for you. Many people get turned off the this process of taking all these extra (and perhaps memory hogging, if it’s an extension) steps just to get a YouTube file on their hard drive in a format that isn’t FLV. Well there is a simple solution that takes care of this for you that requires no software or searching for some online conversion website called PwnYouTube. There’s two ways you can go around using PwnYouTube: the dirty way and the clean way. I’ll give you a quick rundown on how to do both.

The Dirty Way

The dirty way requires the least amount of brain cells to  get the ball rolling, but it requires the most amount of brain cells to complete the process. Quite simply, go to any YouTube video and in the URL box add “pwn” right before the word youtube and hit enter. You will be taken to a page that is another piece of proof that web coders make the absolute worst web designers (there might be a few exceptions). Somehow in that page you must click on the appropriate link that you want. By this point, you pretty much want to find out what the clean way is.

The Clean Way

Before you visit any YouTube site, head over to this link. In a little box there is a bookmarklet link for PwnYouTube. You can either right click on the link and add it to your bookmarks or you can simply drag and drop tehe link to your bookmark toolbar (I prefer the second way because it’s more convenient). Once you’ve done that just go to any YouTube video and click on your PwnYouTube bookmarklet (wherever you have it). A clean little interface is overlayed on your page with direct video download links. If you want to save it as an MP3, there’s a link for that but it takes you to the ugly page from The Dirty Way and you have to manually find the appropriate link from there.