How to download Youtube videos to non jailbroken iPhone?
September 2, 2013 10:44 PM   Subscribe

Is it possible to download Youtube videos directly to a non jailbroken iphone, and if so how?

I recently bought an iPhone 4, and it came with the latest Apple OS on it, which apparently means it can't be jailbroken. The old iphone 3 I used to have came pre jailbroken with mxtube on it. We had downloaded a bunch of videos that keep my baby son entertained for a few minutes at a time, plus my wife had some church sermons in her native languages downloaded on them.

Can we download them directly from the phone or will we be stuck with having to download them on a PC and transfer them to the phone?
posted by Admira to Technology (6 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
This is the only one i could find that seems to actually still exist and work. A lot of them seem to have been killed by violating the youtube TOS.(which is like.. wait, you can get pulled from the app store for not breaking copyright or the app store rules but breaking the rules of some other site? doesn't surprise me, but it's a bit eye roll inducing)

It's irritating that it costs $1.99 because i can't download it and vouch for it.

On preview though i just realized

which apparently means it can't be jailbroken.

Not true! i just jailbroke one before i sent it off to a friend. check this out.

iOS 7 isn't out yet, so the iphone 4 is jailbroken indefinitely until then.
posted by emptythought at 12:33 AM on September 3, 2013


You can jailbreak an iPhone 4 on iOS 6.1.3, it'll just be a "tethered" jailbreak, which is a bit of a hassle. If the phone turns off (such as if it runs out of battery) or reboots for whatever reason, it'll boot up in a seemingly-non-jailbroken state where Safari and Mail crash (and Cydia and other jailbreak-only software won't work) - unless you plug it into a computer and use a jailbreaking tool to assist it with booting up properly.

emptythought's sn0wbreeze instructions will work fine for Windows, but if you have a Mac, you can try these redsn0w instructions, which I maintain as part of my job working on Cydia.

(Possibly unnecessary technical detail: an iPhone 4 can be jailbroken tethered on any iOS version, because there's a known bootrom exploit for that device - in other words, the device is vulnerable to a very low-level exploit that Apple has no way to fix with iOS updates. Jailbreak developers have to find more exploits though to upgrade the jailbreak to an "untethered" jailbreak, which means you can reboot the phone without the help of a computer, and Apple can easily fix those untether exploits with iOS updates. Nobody has released an untethered jailbreak for iOS 6.1.3; the main jailbreak developers plan to wait for the upcoming public release of iOS 7 before spending lots of time trying to find new exploits.)
posted by dreamyshade at 12:57 AM on September 3, 2013


Response by poster: Ok cool, I'm definitely not keen to try jailbreaking myself, but I live in a part of the world where jailbreaking stores are in the top end malls. The place I bought it from claimed to be such a shop, but clearly that place was either a bit behind or just didn't want to bother with it. I'll ask around at a few other places.

Thanks for the expert input!
posted by Admira at 1:28 AM on September 3, 2013


If you have a computer, it'd probably be easier to just download the videos to your itunes folder and sync them.. then you don't need to figure this out every time you update your phone.
posted by empath at 2:48 AM on September 3, 2013


As emptythought mentioned, Google routinely has this kind of apps removed for violation of their TOS.
These two are currently on the appstore, though not for free:
Download All Things Pro
Watchlater
posted by fjom at 10:35 AM on September 3, 2013


GoodReader handles this nicely, in my experience. (I've done it many times on my iPad, usually downloading videos of webinars of a class I'm taking at work, and also just tested it successfully on my iPhone.) And while nobody knows what Apple may do, I think it's unlikely they'll remove the app from the store, since this isn't really "what GoodReader does" — "what GoodReader does" is be a powerful and flexible PDF reader and annotator — it's just a side function.
posted by Lexica at 7:53 PM on September 3, 2013


« Older How do dress rehearsals work in ballet?   |   time for a change Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.