In less than a decade, YouTube has grown a user base of multiple millions of people in the u.S. and many more around the world. Some enjoy watching home-made videos, while others enjoy watching clips from favorite TV shows and movies, and still others watch educational clips.  By far, the majority of people watch the clips directly on the YouTube site.  That’s partly because they don’t know there’s an option for anything is.

But there is. There are literally dozens of websites and computer programs that allow you to download YouTube videos and then convert the proprietary .flv format into format recognized by video programs you likely have on your system.  But why exactly would you want to do that? There are four good reasons you should considering using a YouTube downloader to save your favorite videos.

Reason #1:  The videos might not be available forever.  Whether you’ve noticed or not, thousands of videos are deleted from the main site every month. This is because some people might find the content offensive, or the original uploader might have changed his mind about wanting it posted or, or it might be determined to be outdated.  Also, a lot of files are deleted because of possible copyright infringement, and many more files might be deleted in coming months, depending on the outcomes of lawsuits against YouTube, if these cases tighten the copyright rules.  If you feel you want to still have access to those files, and you’re confident that this will not place you yourself in violation of copyright rules, the best option is to download them to your computer.

Reason #2:  You know you always have access to video files that are on your computer when you use a YouTube downloader.  If you trust the YouTube servers, eventually you’re going to find the service is down, or sometimes it is so overloaded that certain videos either take a long time to play or don’t play at all.  This is not an issue when you play them from your own system.

Reason #3:  The clips will be easier to find when you save them with a YouTube downloader.  Let’s say you enjoy watching commercials from the 1970s.  You will likely spend a lot of time figuring out different keyword combinations to get all the commercials you want.  But once you’ve found them all, if you download them, you can keep them all in a well-labeled file in your computer–in this example, one named “1970s Commercials.”

Reason #4:  You can take the video files with you after saving them with a YouTube downloader.  This is one of the most popular reasons for downloading YouTube videos. By doing so, you can transfer them to mobile devices such as iPods and watch them on the go.

So how do you get the YouTube downloader to do the video downloads?  Just do a Google or Yahoo search for YouTube Downloader and you’ll find several options.

Fortunately, there are now several websites that make this YouTube Converter service available.  Using them, it just takes a couple mouse clicks and a few seconds to permanently convert the YouTube.flv file to a different video format and store it on your system. Here are the best Web-based YouTube converter programs to do this:

1) www.tubegrip.com. Tubegrip lets you can paste a YouTube video URL and download the FLV video file. This makes it easy to download videos from YouTube and many other support Tube sites.

2) www.videodownloadx.com.  While there aren’t many options at this site, it does its job and it does it well.  The interface is plain but easy to understand work with.  As a bonus, it also lets you share you favorite YouTube videos with friends over e-mail.  On the negative side, all of their videos will have get video as part of their names, and you must manually add the .flv extension.

3) www.keepvid.com is also a simple to use YouTube converter site.  It allows you to save, not just YouTube videos, but also those for other popular video sites such as My Space, Google Video, DailyMotion and more.  Once gain, though, you need to manually add the .flv file extension.

4) YouTube Downloads has an unexpected web address:  http://www.downloadandsaveyoutubevideos.info.  But aside from this unusual distinction, it also separates itself from the competition by making use of a proxy to download videos.  This means that even if your YouTube access has been blocked (for instance, at work), you can probably still download the videos.

5) www.zamzar.com does an outstanding job of converting YouTube videos–and a lot more.  There are too many uses to name them all here, so check it out yourself.

6) www.YouTubia.com creates a niche for itself by allowing users to not just download YouTube files, but to search for the ones they want.  There are only a few options available, but the ones that are there work well.

7) www.vidgrab.com is a YouTube converter service that works with YouTube, MySpace, Google Video and Break.com.  They also offer a handy list of the most-viewed videos.

www.mediaconverter.org is sometimes a bit slower, but the conversion results are good.  It excels at converting YouTube files to the .avi format.  What’s more, it also supports several document and audio formats.

There are a few more online YouTube converter options, and even some desktop applications that will allow you to save YouTube videos.  But better make use of them soon, because the time that your favorite files are hosted there might be limited–and they might disappear forever with one ruling of a court.