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Tip: Saving YouTube Videos to Hard Disk from Firefox


Xanthomatose

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Hello all I though you might find this useful:

 

First of all you must know that videos in YouTube are encoded as FLV files. These are then directed to the YouTube flash player which allows the file to be viewed in the browser. So this is not your typical "streaming" video.

 

So we first need to intercept the link to the FLV file from the player. To do this we can use a very cool tool called VideoDownloader. This is a small firefox extension and can be downloaded from: https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/2390/

 

Once this is installed, it will insert itself into the status bar (icon on the far right hand corner). From the youtube player window, hit the icon. A small window will popup and provide the required link to the FLV file. Right click the "Download Link" button and save "get_video.htm" someplace. This appears to be an html file, but it is in fact an FLV file so rename it to the correct .flv extension.

 

Now to be play the FLV file we need a player. Aptly FLV Player works great.

 

EDIT: (17th Jun 06)

Well since it wasn't clear, this extension makes use of an external server, which many people object to. So instead one can use a cool tool called the all-in-one video bookmarklet. It is a simple bookmark that contains some javascript code that does the processing locally and will extract the required URL easily:

 

http://1024k.de/bookmarklets/video-bookmarklets.html

 

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Originally posted by sah5150

Great! Thanks for the info...


BTW - Is that you in the picture in your avatar? What's that stuff on your face that you're trying to lick?


Steve

 

 

HAHA! I'M trying to lick?! That's Monica Bellucci with.. well .. what looks like honey... but I'd gladly to the licking for her...

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Originally posted by Xanthomatose



HAHA! I'M trying to lick?! That's Monica Bellucci with.. well .. what looks like honey... but I'd gladly to the licking for her...

 

 

Hey... how was I supposed to know?... that stuff looks white anyway...

 

Thanks,

 

Steve

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Originally posted by SkyhighRocks

how about converting to avi, wmv or something else?

 

 

MPlayer provides mencoder that works great from the command line so thats what I use from both Linux and windows.

 

FFmpeg also converts any file format from the command line and is very versatile.

 

For something graphical try this perhaps:

http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

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OK, for a possibly neater solution to the firefox extension (which wouldn't install itself in Debian for some strange reason):
http://1024k.de/bookmarklets/video-bookmarklets.html

It is simply a bookmark that will extract the FLV URL for you through the use of some small javascript code. It is also client based which is an advantage and is faster.

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Yup, I've been using that video downloader+SUPER converter for a long time now. It's really great!
And the best thing is when you try that to google videos - you can automatically download .avi from there ;). It also works with hundreds of others similar webpages and not only for videos, also for mp3s and .swf files ;).

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beware, check out this post on mozilla:

"This Extension should be removed from the official Firefox Add-ons Site.

Every Time you use this Extensions your download request is redirected through the Server of the Developer, thus he can track every user of his Extension.
After that the server uploads JavaScripts from Tracking Sites like sitemeter.com statcounter.com and google-analytics.com to your Computer.

This behaviour is not mentioned anywhere thus I consider this Extension as Spyware."

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Originally posted by madler

beware, check out this post on mozilla:


"This Extension should be removed from the official Firefox Add-ons Site.


Every Time you use this Extensions your download request is redirected through the Server of the Developer, thus he can track every user of his Extension.

After that the server uploads JavaScripts from Tracking Sites like sitemeter.com statcounter.com and google-analytics.com to your Computer.


This behaviour is not mentioned anywhere thus I consider this Extension as Spyware."

 

 

I posted the bookmarklet bokmark utility which is totally client based. That means all processing is done locally. The firefox plugin does refer to an external server for processing. When I realised that I posted the alternative.

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