I used to use the Safari Activity Window to save some YouTube videos on my Mac and that used to work fine.

But lately I come across more and more You Tube videos where the video portion sems to be divided up into many 1.7M segments - at least that's what I see when I check the Safari activity window.

Do I need to download all of these segmenst and the stich the video together?
Or is there a better way?

BTW - I have tried umpteen applications that are specifically designed yo save YouTube videos but most of them don't work - they either come back with a message that no appropriate file was found or come back with nothing at all.

What do people use - not just for YouTube but in general - to save videos streamed on the net?

you might try using a plugin called 'Ant Video' through firefox. thats what i've used in the past (but not recently)

When I used Camino as my default browser, I had the ad-blocker GlimmerBlock installed. The ad-blocker works with Firefox and Safari too.

What I didn't realize until my recent switch to Firefox was that GlimmerBlocker would add a link "Download video" to most YouTube pages. As soon as the video starts playing, the link appears. If you change the video resolution then click the Download video link, you will get the higher resolution video.

Here's a standalone, free solution: ClipGrab

If you install the RealPlayer SP, it includes a downloader that will dettect when you connect to Youtube, at which point you can download the videoclip and the downloader also includes an conversion utulity, so you can change the videoclip to a different format. However, it does not have a 'stitching' utility to join video clips....

HTH...

I have found that RealPlayer no longer can download videos from YouTube. I have contacted them and they tell they are working on it but that was 3 months ago and still not working

I have had and used 'iSkysoft iTube Studio' that works quite well for me, even in its unregistered trial mode.

It seems to occasionally work with other video sites as well that aren't youtube videos.

[quote]
"iTube Studio downloads videos from YouTube and almost any YouTube-like video sharing sites. It is also a great video player and converter."

YouTube Software to Download and Convert YouTube Video |iSkysoft

I installed Glimmer Block, Ant Video and ClipGrab

For the first two I couldn't find the download link in Firefox for love or money.
I don't know if the link didn't come up because these apps didn't recognize the video as YouTube or if I was too stupid to find the link - it sure wasn't obvious.

With ClipGrap it was interesting.
I like the way the application is set up, nice and simple to use.
It didn't recognize my "YouTube" video either (although any of my browsers will play it, but ClipGrab has a search option so I just entered the name of the video and voila - it was downloaded no problem.
The URL was slightly different than what I copied from the browser so it seems one can manipulate the YouTube URL to still have it play via a browser but not have it recognized by these YouTube downloaders.

I'm going to stick with ClipGrab as long as it works and send them a donation.

In FF I use DownloadHelper - Media download Firefox extension or FlashAndVideo Add-On as add-ons with excellent results so far.

Download helper wasn't working until an update recently as they said you tube had changed something which caused the segments the op saw, the other add on i listed above worked fine.