How to download videos from Youtube and similar sites
One of the most common questions people have when browsing sites like Youtube is, “How can I download these movies to my hard drive.”
The answer is quite simple. Youtube and similar video sites convert all movies uploaded to their servers to Flash format. Flash videos end in the .flv extension. You can’t download these videos in your browser by default, but it is possible if you have the right plug-in installed and you’re using the right browser.
What’s the right browser, you ask? Well, that would be Firefox, of course. Firefox is a free alternative to Internet Explorer and a superior product in just about every way. Why anyone would voluntarily use IE exclusively when Firefox is available is a mystery to me. Anyway, if you want to download Youtube videos, you’re going to have to download Firefox first and then read on.
Once you have Firefox downloaded, all you need to do is download a free Firefox plug-in called Download Helper. Download Helper adds a button to your Firefox browser that will light up when you’re on a page that has embedded videos that you can download. When this button lights up, you click on it, select the .flv file, and download it.
Now that you have the Flash video file on your computer, you need a way to play it. Windows Media Player won’t work, so you’ll need to download a Flash-compatible movie player such as Media Player Classic. Media Player Classic is a much better movie player than the one that comes with Windows anyway, so you should download it regardless.
There is another option besides downloading a special movie player for Flash videos. You could convert the .flv to a Windows Media Player compatible format such as .wmv. The easiest way to do this is to upload your .flv file to a website such as Media Converter, which will convert the video file for you to your chosen format automatically. Then you can download the converted file from the same website and watch it with Windows Media Player.
Besides Media Converter, you may want to check out Media Convert, Zamzar, or Vixy, which all offer the same service.
February 7th, 2008 at 7:34 pm
[...] trailers is never an easy task (unless you can download .flv files, which I’ll talk about in another post), but I stumbled across a site yesterday called Movie List that makes it fairly [...]