Thursday, July 05, 2007

Download Your Favorite Videos

Every day, we see thousands of videos being uploaded in many of the video hosting sites like Dailymotion, Youtube, Veoh. These sites are very interesting as there is something in every genre - Science and Technology, Gaming, Music.

In fact any video can be found with a proper search. However a small problem exists with these videos, they can be seen but cannot be downloaded straight from the website as there is no download facility in most of these sites. So the storage of our favorite videos is not possible. But as usual, there is always a solution to a problem.

Let me explain this with an example. Consider this video, It is from Dailymotion from the games genre. It is the preview of the latest Need For Speed game - The Prostreet (I know I can embed the video here, but I want you to go to the original site).

Now, you can see the video being buffered so that it can be viewed; scroll down a bit in the page. Here two important links will be given. One is the permanent link and the other is the embeddable player. The embeddable player code can be copied into an html page for the video to be embedded onto the webpage. However we are aiming to save it on our system. This is now possible with a few websites that help us to download video content. A few of them are KeepVid, ClipNabber.

Consider I am downloading from ClipNabber. I paste the permanent link in the space given there, which is right below the logo and click the download button. Now scroll on the same page a bit, and just after the logo you will find a "download link" button. Click on that and select save, select the folder where it is required and the job is done. The video will be stored in the computer. Whatever maybe the format of the downloaded video, change the extension of the file to .flv. You will need Flash Player to play files with this format.

Better players can be found with a little bit effort. The beauty of the flv format is its small size, that is in this example 45 seconds of video was only of about 1.5 MB, which is very less when compared to other formats. This video can be converted into other formats with the help of video converters also if required.

This solves a large part of our initial problem, but not the entire problem. That is because this works with videos that are available directly without any registration. Now what if a registration is required, we cannot use any of these sites for download. Generally registration is required for some websites and a few videos of the above-mentioned sites. However this problem was solved by the latest version of Real Player that was released. This player can download video that can be watched by us. For example, if there was a video which can viewed only after registering, all we have to do is register and go to the video, immediately a small pop up will appear above the video saying "Download this video using Real Player". Click on this and the video will be downloaded on to the system. However Real Player 11 is still a beta version and its limitations cannot be told yet.

Before I conclude this article, I would like people to know that this article is not for supporting piracy, but only for videos which have proper rights. After all an original will always be an original.

Have fun!