blog: download youtube videos

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog article found at:
http://zabkat.com/blog/30Nov08-youtube-downloader.htm

[RickyF]

I am astonished to read that you don't use Firefox. Do you use Windows Explorer? No, you use xplorer² Professional.

Firefox is far superior to IE7 in its extensibility and usefulness. I urge you to reconsider your browser.

[desslok]

This trick can't be used in Firefox because nowhere in file names does flv appear. But their size is usually bigger than other files, so sorting by size will usually get there.

[nikos]

so for firefox you have to search for files e.g. larger than 500KB in the cache and then sort the results by date. Also FLV files start by "FLV" so searching for contained text "FLV$01" will also grab them (albeit at much slower rate)

rickyF i use IE6 which is nice and lightweight. You don't do much with it other than click on links so even MS can manage that without annoying me

[nikos]

ps could it be that WMP can play flv files after all? Has anyone tried this?
http://www.playflv.com/

[pschroeter]

Firefox
(plus to download them)
DownloadHelper
http://www.downloadhelper.net/
(plus to play them)
FLV Player
http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/flv-player/

[desslok]

[wasker]

[The Dude]

[narayan]

I am not (yet) an expert in this topic, but it seems some websites have streaming videos; so the video is not deposited first in the cache. The best example is SNL videos (from MSNBC website). If we search the cache, all we get is a small swf file called player (or something similar).

But the video does stop from time to time "to buffer", which means that it must be loading in the memory, at least in parts (if not whole).

Any idea how to grab those videos?

[nikos]

this MSNBC also uses flash player, so i bet the video is in the cache somewhere. Try searching without a particular wildcard (no *FLV) and instead add a rule for size >500KB and date <= 1 hour

[desslok]

[BRX]

If you like to save flash movies or other streams Orbitdownloader is indeed a very good (free) tool and DL-Manager, since it's component Grabit+ reveals a lot of the hidden links of the streams and lets it download.

If you're interested in Youtube only I'd recommend Free Download Manager which is an excellent opensource DL-Manager, integrates well with the browsers, can be used as a portable and also preserves titles and upload dates of the Youtube videos.

Downlading from Youtube has ever been only a right-click in the browser since for me.

[narayan]

desslok,

yes, that's the site I am talking about.

BRX,

I have installed orbit, but never used it, because I used the other downloader addons for FF:

DownloadHelper

I also installed some more exotic-sounding FF addons but didn't get around to use-

Flash Video resources downloader
Fast video download
DownloadThemAll
MediaDownloader
Amazing Media Browser
Magic's video downloader

Some of these addons work through a website.
******
BTW the FDM cannot detect the youtube links with their titles (the actual name of the video at YouTube is always "getvideo"; so if you download multiple videos, FDM just puts a running suffix after them.

That's why I CTRL+CLick on the video's name from the DownloadHelper's popup list, which is caught automatically by FDM, with proper name.

Ideally DownloadHelper alone should be sufficient, because Youtube does allows a single thread in the download (and that too, non-resumable); so FDM cannot accelerate/resume the download. However, it can be set to restart the download in case of a stopped download, which is really helpful (you do not have to monitor the downloads).

[BRX]

@Narayan:

Maybe you've got other properties for FDM. I know for a fact that FDM saves the flv files with their title and not with "getdownload" or something.

Otherwise I wouldn't have written it.