Want to watch that latest video that is creating a lot of ripples in the web? Well, we all go to YouTube for that. However, some of these videos are so good that we wish we could download them. Alas, that option is not provided by YouTube. So let’s look at a few other ways to download them.

The YouTube Videos can be downloaded to your desktop/laptop, Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, cell phone, Sony PlayStation… well, the list just goes on. In a nutshell, you can download your favorite YouTube video for any of your media players and in any file formats you wish. In this article, however, we will concentrate mostly on the means of downloading YouTube videos to your desktop.

Just one more bit of information- keep a FLV player ready, as most of these downloaders just grab a YouTube video in their native Flash Format.

Free services:

1. Downloader9: Downloader9 is simple and easy. You just need to copy and paste the YouTube URL here to get complete mileage, i.e. a download link for the FLV file.

2. KeepVid: This works in the same way of copying and pasting the YouTube URL and generating a further download link from it. However, it lets you download in the FLV as well as MP4 format.

3. Vixy: This service also follows the same URL copy-pasting philosophy. However, it provides you  further file formatting options like AVI, MP3, MP4 and 3GP.

4. VideoDownloadX: This only offers FLV format. So you need to rename the existing file to something.FLV.

5. VideoGetting: This supports conversion to multiple formats – WMV, MP3, MP4, MOV, 3GP, AVI, MPG, MPEG

One thing you need to keep in mind about these freebies is that, since they are freebies, they do come with their own set of nuisances – a bevy of advertising features like pop-ups, heavily advertised pages and so on.

Paid Services:

1. iDesktop.tv: If you are ready to part with $7/month to increase your YouTube video collection, this lets you do exactly that. The paid version offers the nifty advantage of converting YouTube videos to MP3 format, while the free version offers formats: AVI, MP4, MOV, 3PG, 3PG2, WMV, FLV, EXE, ZIP. However the free version allows only a limited number of daily downloads,while the paid version offers unlimited downloads.

2. Moyea YouTube FLV Downloader: Unlike its name, its paid version does allow conversion to many file formats, like MP4, 3GP, AVI, MOV, MPG, MKV, FLV, MP3, MKA, WAV, AC3, and M4A.

3. Desktop YouTube Downloader: This is probably the best paid client for YouTube downloads as it not only supports conversion to MP3 and Wav formats, MPEG, WMV and 3GP, but you can also use it for saving and watching your YouTube videos on your iPhone/iPod touch and/or cell phones. It further lets you extract the audio track.

Windows Clients: Most of the above mentioned services work just fine on Windows. A special few are Vixy, Orbit Downloader and VDownloader.

MacOSX Clients: Vixy has a Mac client as well. But if you are a Mac fan, you can jolly well try out TubeSock which allows you conversions to MP4, H.264 and MP3 formats. This service lets you take your YouTube videos beyond your computers-to the iPhoens and iPod touches as well as even Sony PlayStation Portable. In a nutshell, it makes YouTube portable for you.

Do let us know if you come across something intereting in this vein.