Download Web videos with Firefox

Did you ever want to download Web videos from sites such as YouTube or others (such as http://www.vidohe.com/sites.php)? Firefox 3.0 together with the free Firefox extension DownloadHelper makes this very easy (see the DownloadHelper homepage for more details).

DownloadHelper even provides a Video Conversion feature to allow background conversion of the downloaded video to the format that you like (e.g. from FLV to a format that can be used by iTunes e.g. to load on your iPod or iPhone). This feature relies on FFMPEG available on your system (for Linux or Mac), which can lead to conversion failures as the version of FFMPEG may not have been compiled with the features required by the chosen conversion parameters. You can therefore recompile FFMPEG by yourself with the required features.

Note: With Ubuntu 9.10 - the Karmic Koala - there is no need to recompile FFMEG. It just works fine.

As an alternative, you can use an external application such as MPEG Streamclip video converter
for Mac OS X - a powerful high-quality video converter and more (if you want to convert FLV files - install Perian, an free open source QuickTime component as well).

Note that unless stated otherwise, downloaded videos should be kept for personal
use (e.g. not shown on other Web sites).

Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 22, 2010 at 8:00:00 AM GMT+1

    Note: As the DownloadHelper can save videos as mp4 and iTunes can add mp4 files to the iTunes library, you don't need any other conversion tool if you want for instance watch that video on your iphone.

    ReplyDelete

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