Skip to main content

Download Any Video On The Web With DownloadHelper

downloadhelper

Have you ever wanted to watch a longer video clip or documentary, only to suffer frequent pauses in playback? Me too. What I prefer to do is download the video and then watch it non-stop on my computer. If the file is local, there’s no lag and no annoying blips.

It used to be that there were only a few video file formats and they were easily download by right-clicking and saving them. Now there is the Flash Video format (FLV), Windows Media Video (WMV), MPEG-4, QuickTime and many more.

Let’s take a look at the tool I would recommend, personally.

DownloadHelper

This is the application I use. It plugs in to Firefox, so it’s always there in my toolbar, right when I need it. Any site I’ve been on, where there is video content, I’ve always been able to download it.

Download and Install DownloadHelper

Point your browser at the DownloadHelper site. Once you are there, look for the Add to Firefox button and click right there.

add_to_firefoxAfter clicking on the button, you’ll see the Software Installation screen. To continue, click on the Install Now button.

software_installation

What happens next? Well, let me show you. Camera guy, are you getting this?

downloading

It downloads quickly. Then, it self-installs. All it wants you to do now is Restart Firefox. So let’s do that.

restart_firefoxOnce Firefox restarts, you’ll see the DownloadHelper button in your toolbar. Sure, it’s greyed out, but once we begin to use it, you’ll see how it works.

downloadhelper_toolbarUsing DownloadHelper

Let’s say, I go to DailyMotion and I want to download the Glutes are Made For Walking video - just to send it to my wife, because she doesn’t believe me that women do this sort of thing. Seriously though, check out the video. It’s funny, yet creepy - kind of like someone poking you in the belly button.

Once the video starts playing, you can see the DownloadHelper icon in colour, and spinning.

downloadhelper_toolbar_active

Now, if you just want the video so you can watch it later, just click on it and click on the file name of the video. You may want to note that the file name isn’t always something easily recognizable. In this case, it’s a bunch of numbers.

quick_download

DownloadHelper even gives me the ability to convert the video from FLV to, say, AVI or any other format. If this were a documentary, I might want to change it to AVI, so I could burn it to a DVD. To perform the conversion, you need to have some more software installed like FFMPEG, which you can learn more about over at FFMPEG.org. It appears to be the backbone to many video conversion software applications.

DownloadHelper also comes with other features, such as multiple video download, great documentation and a guide, of sorts, to sites featuring videos. It is freeware, but I would recommend donating a few bucks to the developer. It’s definitely good work. Keep the karma going. Just like the glute exercises….

Do you save your online videos? Will this little add-on come in handy? Shout out in the comments!

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How To Hide Text In Microsoft Word 2007, Reveal It & Protect It

Sometimes what we hide is more important than what we reveal. Especially, documents with sensitive information, some things are supposed to be ‘for some eyes only’. Such scenarios are quite common, even for the more un-secretive among us. You want to show someone a letter composed in MS Word, but want to keep some of the content private; or it’s an official letter with some part of it having critical data. As important as these two are, the most common use could involve a normal printing job. Many a time we have to print different versions of a document, one copy for one set of eyes and others for other sets. Rather than creating multiple copies and therefore multiple printing jobs, what if we could just do it from the same document?  That too, without the hassle of repeated cut and paste. We can, with a simple feature in MS Word – it’s just called Hidden and let me show you how to use it to hide text in Microsoft Word 2007. It’s a simple single click process. Open the docum...
1 comment
Read more

Build Your Own Awesome Personal 3D Avatar with Avatara

Do you use social networks and want to build your own awesome 3D avatar? Maybe you want to send someone a cute cuddly image of yourself (kind of)? Or maybe you have your own ideas of what you would do with an Avatar… Well look no further than Avatara which I discovered from the MakeUseOf directory . You can create 3d avatars out of pre-set up templates or create your own from scratch. To start, visit Avatara’s homepage . You will see this screen: Click Get Started to umm, get started! That will take you to this screen: You see that you can build your own Avatar using an uploaded head shot like the Obama one above (just an example, guys). Or roll with one of their awesome avatars. I chose to start with a blank avatar by clicking Start with a blank avatar at the bottom of the screen. That takes you to here: I clicked on the filter at the top and told it to filter out everything but male characters and then I saw this: I rolled with Buck and continued. You need to click Select...
1 comment
Read more

Ex-Skypers Launch Virtual Whiteboard Deekit

Although seriously long in the tooth and being disrupted by a plethora of startups, for many years Skype has existed as an almost ubiquitous app in any remote team’s toolkit. So it seems apt that a new startup founded by a team of ex-Skype employees is set to tackle another aspect of online collaboration. Deekit, which exits private beta today, is a virtual and collaborative whiteboard to help remote teams work smarter. The Tallinn, Estonia-based startup is headed up by founder and CEO, Kaili Kleemeier, who was previously a Head of Operations at Skype. She and three colleagues quit the Internet calling giant in 2012 and spent a year researching ideas in the remote team space. They ended up focusing on creating a new virtual whiteboard, born out of Kleemeier’s experience collaborating with technical teams remotely, specifically helping Skype deal with incident management. “Working with remote teams has been a challenge in many ways – cultural differences, language differences, a...
Post a Comment
Read more