I don’t know if it’s just my broadband not being quite so broad as I think or whether it’s Google not paying its electrical bills–but I do know that, more often than not, when I try to watch a video on YouTube, it plays for 10 seconds, pauses, plays for 10 seconds, pauses, etc.  This is not what I expect in the vibrant always-on no-latency world of tomorrow. 

So, I found a tool that lets me download YouTube videos to my hard drive and then play them back as .FLV files.  This is obviously not something you want to do for any random video you might watch, but for videos you know you want to see, like one I just downloaded about ‘web analytics’, it’s a lifesaver.

Anywho, you can find the tool to do the conversion at [1] http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie/ 

You type in the URL of the YouTube video you want to download, and it asks you where you want to save it. You then let the tool work its magic.  You will need a video player like VLC to playback FLV files, though.  You can find this free player (which also plays back .mkv files) at [2] www.videolan.org/vlc