Exceptional Internet

Internet video sites are everywhere, youtube, dailymotion, google video, veoh, megavideo…the list is endless and there is some amazing content to be found on these sites. The only problem is that you need to be connected to the internet to view it and for the most part these sites don’t let you download video to watch offline and with the rise in video ipods, psps and all manner of portable video players wouldn’t it be nice to download your favourite clips and shows and take them with you?

Well actually you can, and it’s not even hard and won’t cost you any money at all. That’s right you can download almost any video that you watch online and save it to your hard disk using only free software. And we’ll tell you how!

In part 2 we’ll go one step further and tell you how to convert the downloaded videos to the mp4 format used by popular portable video devices such as ipod and psp, again with free software.

So how do we do it? Well first you need to make sure that you are using the popular Firefox web browser. If you are still using internet explorer then it’s time to switch anyway, and this is just another good reason. You can get Firefox for free from here. Download and install it.

Now, one of the cool things about Firefox is that you can extend it’s functionality with freely available plugins. One such plugin is called DownloadHelper. Download it and install it from here.

Now you have all you need head off to your favourite video site, Youtube for example and find a video that you want to download. When you are viewing a page with video content you’ll notice to the right of the address bar in Firefox that the DownloadHelper icon comes to life. If you click on the little black “down” arrow nex to it you’ll see a list of the video content in the page. Pick the main one and you’ll be prompted to save it.

It really is that easy! Need a picture to help? This one tells you all you need to know…

That’s it. Of course you’ll need to know where to find content worth keeping. We can help with that too, just check out Exceptional Internet TV for top shows worth keeping.

The downloaded video files will be in FLV format which require a player such as Wimpy to watch them. In part 2 of this article we’ll tell you how to do some free flv to mp4 conversion to enable you to view the files on your ipod, psp or other mp4 player.

Filed under: Software