My mate Clinton who lives in Brisbane these days has asked me a question
Hi mate - Quick question... is it possible to download a video from Youtube?
Obviously I need to subscribe Clinton to the Mullies email list! We have touched on this before and there are many ways to download internet video
I wrote about one in our blog about 4 months ago here:
Easiest way to save Youtube videos
Otherwise there are programs or browser plugins you can install.
I use this one in Firefox Video DownloadHelper
What I didn't touch on before is what to do once the video is downloaded. Most internet video is in a proprietary format that average media players like the Windows Media Player can't play. Youtube videos are in the FLV format
So once you save the file you have 2 choices
- Use a media player that can play these kind of clips
The most recommended media players are Media Player Classic and VLC both of which are open source and available here
http://www.videolan.org/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/
VLC gets a lot of wraps as it is self contained ad doesn't rely on the codecs already installed in Windows. But I like MPC better. It will play the FLV and allows seeking (Fast Forward and Rewind) that VLC doesn't do well - Convert the file to a different format
I found this the other day and it is excellent and also open source
WinFF
It will convert files between all different formats for use on portable devices (phones, ipods) and can even prepare files to DVD movie format ready to burn
I've tried a couple and this one is very easy and quite fast plus you can't be that price - free!
The program is developed by a fellow called BigMatt (no relation!) and is a front end to another open source program. Highly recommended
So there you go. Now you can download all the files you like and watch them or convert them to watch later on any device.
If you haven't checked out Youtube there is an incredible amount of video on there. There is a lot of entertainment stuff but also a lot of instructional and demonstration videos. For example I have saved a couple of videos recently on things as diverse as:
- how to sharpen a kitchen knife (ready for the Xmas turkey)
- how to chop certain vegetables for stir frying
- how to perform certain functions in MYOB (to give to Rhonda and the nice ladies at the Milton-Ulladulla Meals on Wheels, and
- a load of humorous and sporting clips.
Youtube works if you only have dial up but would be so slow you probably would give up. If you find a video you really would like just let me know and I will download it for you. :)
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