Thursday, May 21, 2009

Download Tools: Videos from YouTube

YouTube is quite popular nowadays, and some people love to download videos from there to show their friends/relatives or for their own enjoyment. Although the quality of past videos was far more worse, nowadays there are some videos in YouTube are available either in HQ (High Quality - sharper .flv videos) or HD (High Definition - Bigger and Better .mp4 videos, near DVD quality) versions. So, do you know how to download the videos? You have three options:

1. Via Internet Video Downloader sites
2. Via Video DownloadHelper Add-on Tool (for Mozilla Firefox users)
  • For those who had Mozilla Firefox, go to here and press "Add to Firefox" to download the add-on.
  • Firefox would automatically downloads the tool and integrates it within the Firefox itself.
  • Firefox would request to restart so you could use the tool after Firefox restarts.
  • If successful, an icon consisting of three orbs would appear next to Firefox's URL box. A new tab would appear too to thank you for using the tool.
  • Now, if you want to download a video from YouTube, open the video you want and then press the little button next to the logo and choose the video type you want to download. (Notice the icon may become coloured and animated if the video is available)
  • More options/configuration available at Firefox's Tools > DownloadHelper > Preferences menu.
3. Via YouTube Downloader program.
  • Download the program here.
  • Not only easy, it actually have file conversion features!
Among the three options, I prefer the second one and mostly recommended because:
  • You can actually download HQ/HD version of YouTube videos (if the video had the HQ or HD button) if you know the trick.
  • Not only limited to YouTube, but also any videos from other sites (GoogleVideo, Vimeo, etc) and other file formats (.swf, .mov, etc...)

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