I must warn you, this post is intended only for educational purposes, or for downloading videos without copyright.
Ever had times when you saw that cool video on Yahoo! Video, Google Video, or YouTube, and wanted to download that, and didn’t know the way? If you’re in luck, some videos directly have a download option in Google Video. But if not, here’s how you can get it. Do note that the picture quality of the video you rip will be probably be pretty poor. I’ll take the DPS VK Annual Day video we made as an example.
- First off, switch to Mozilla Firefox for your browsing needs – you’ll be needing it.
- After installing Firefox, get some download manager like FlashGet, or search for similar download helpers on Mozilla Add-ons Search. You’ll need to restart Firefox after installing the helper.
- Go to the page of the video you want to download. Depending upon your helper, it’ll show up next to the location bar, or in the status bar. Wait for the page to load, and then click on the helper icon. It should show you a file ending with the extension ‘.flv’. Click on that to download.
- Now you’ve downloaded your vid, but in a flash format. To play this, use an FLV player like Riva. Note that Google uses *.gvp, which needs the Google Video Player – you can download that from the Google Video site.
- You’d probably want to convert this into some more commonly used format like MPEG or WMV. Use a video file format converter like the ones from Xilisoft. Do note that for full usage, you’ll be needing a serial for the software as it is paid.