Downloading You Tube Videos

I had always been a casual collector of music videos, particularly from the pre-MTV era. However the onset of You Tube rapidly accelerated my interest, as clips from Bandstand, Ed Sullivan, Shindig, Hullabaloo, Shivaree and other shows were posted. In the early days of You Tube this was a true bonanza as collectors posted thousands of these clips. But if you look at You Tube today you find very few of these any more because of copyright infringement claims. One poster complained that Dick Clark Productions made him take down a clip (The Skyliners' "Since I Don't Have You") even though the alleged copyright holder apparently didn't even have a copy of its own. Fortunately, I learned very early that You Tube videos are not merely streamed, but are actually downloaded onto your computer. So if you can access your browser's cache, you can save a copy of the video for yourself. It's easy in Internet Explorer--just go to tools, Internet Options, settings and view files, then copy and paste. The earlier versions of Firefox had readily identifiable cache folders, but I haven't been able to find them in the recent versions. Fortunately there's a Firefox plug in called Cache Viewer which does a decent, though not complete, job of capturing files in the cache.