I've got my iphone exactly seven days ago, and have been playing with all the homebrews available. There is a long way to go compared to PSP's homebrew scene

There are currently several issues with grabbing youtube onto iPhone:

* Youtube on iPhone requires online viewing only.
* Youtube Grab hack (from the Iphone Dev team) is pre-alpha.
* If you try to use indirect download method through sites such as VideoDL.org, you will get videos that are not designed for iphones (.H264) / quality is also not good.

What I'm writing here is a windows (although the principle is same for all operating systems) guide that aims to

A) Use a proxy to intercept the http request between iphone and youtube.
B) Through FireFox (impersonating iphone), download the address which we intercepted in part A

Ok, here goes:

Before you start

1) Download and install Firefox
2) Open firefox, go and install User Agent Switcher
3) In FireFox, Click Tools->User Agent Switcher->Options->Options
4) Click User Agents, and press Add
5) Type "iPhone Safari" in Description Field
6) Copy this the bolded text Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3 into UserAgent field.
7) Press OK to save the entry (you may come back and edit this in the future)
8) Press OK to save User Agent Switch settings.

Part A

1) Download http://www.pocketsoap.com/tcptrace/pt.aspx
2) Run proxytrace.exe
3) You will be prompted, which port to act as the proxy port. Default is 8080. Push OK to continue.
4) Find out the Machine Name or IP address of the PC running proxyTrace. Make sure this network location is accessible by the iPhone.
5) On your iphone, goto Settings->WiFi->[Your Connection]
8) Scroll to the bottom, and click on HTTP Proxy's Manual button.
9) For SERVER, type the address or ipaddress. For PORT, put in the port number you used in step 3).
10) Go back to Spring/SummerBoard.

Part B

From here on in, you can repeat 12-16 to download all the videos you like

11) Switch your Firefox User Agent to "iPhone Safari". Tools->User Agent Switch->iPhone Safari.

12) On your iphone, find your favorite youtube, and play it.

You will immediately notice proxyTrace is picking up the conversations between youtube.com and your iphone. Among the conversation list, you will see iphone requesting to

* img.youtube.com (ignore these entries, they are just image requests)
* vp.video.google.com (doesn't have to be exact, because youtube video hosts are distributed).

13) You can stop the youtube playing on the iPhone.
14) In proxyTrace, click on the conversation list (the left-hand-side pane). Specifically, click on the entry that says something like "vp.video.google.com".
15) In proxyTrace's right-hand-side, you will see something that starts with this:

GET http://vp.video.google.com/videodownload?version=0&secureurl=sQAAALxRpszUgTK_ K_xaZ04iy5uVbv7V9S2ASQdGzxS0stTJTVoglf59aZD4ahI8Lk x8HE61058BG5h3XTdTFfUNIG5s3mDKa8s7Cqly-H55Nh29Dr-dyvVahl0Kb4_w4I34yXjufQ36UWI2SUe_rrw1DWl8_3VVX_Vlc xXz-oquX4kV2p9_fgbeQSzQgCy2-p3Oag15d71Z_Ll13aTbFDB2TjPZgQBTKrMjKyUYchOOWxVVbXN mQr-EfeRWLh9BHNuimQ&sigh=RgYwxIsOOh0COvwPBsKiiFC9yak&b egin=0&len=216000&docid=-8545519679077110251 HTTP/1.1
Accept: */*
Accept-Language: en
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

16) Copy and Paste the http address (highlight in Bold in step 14) to FireFox. Your youtube address will obviously be different.
17) Confirm download, and wait for the Firefox to finish downloading it.

Space for FAQ