How To Download Videos From The Web
This detailed video guides you through downloading a video from website such as youtube.com to your computer in more usable formats such as mpeg4 and avi rather than the usual flv which requires a special player to watch.
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Step 1:
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Video Hosting
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Hello and welcome to another Googlegum tutorial. In this video I’m going to show you how to download a movie off You Tube, although it doesn’t have to be You Tube I can be Googlevideos, Metacafe, Daily motion, or any other video hosting website like that.
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Step 2:
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FLV Player
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Unlike other methods, in this method you will not get an flv file which can only be played in an flv player or requires you to download a converter. In this method we can convert the file on the server to a range of formats including avi which is divx, mp4, mov, and even get the sound only from the video as an MP3 track.
This has a range of benefits. For instance if you’re making a movie you can use the video in that, because flv’s are normally not accepted for instance by Windows Movie Maker. Or you can download the movie for your ipod or PSP so you can watch on the go. Or you can even just download the sound for Windows Media Player or iTunes so you can listen to it on your computer.
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Step 3:
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Download
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In this tutorial I’m actually going to download it straight off You Tube, it’s easier. So open it up; I’m using Firefox of course. You can watch another tutorial by me on how to download that.
I’m going to search for ‘Oh You Tube’ and find this video but you can of course download whatever you want. Go to the webpage; I’m just going to pause it so that I don’t listen to it while I’m talking to you.
And up here we want to copy the web address to the clipboard. Open a new tab and in the address bar type, www.vixy.net and press enter. Once on vixie.net we want to put the url of our video in here, where it says URL obviously.
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Step 4:
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Other Formats
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And then here we can select the format of the video we want to download as. So; avi, mov, mp4, 3gp, and mp3 which is just the sound. For this tutorial I’m just going to download it to my PC as an avi. So press start, and then it will start converting the video.
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Step 5:
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Potential Errors
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Here you can see the progress. Once it reaches about 11%, the percentage will appear here. If it comes up with ‘error’ You tube might be down, or ‘error sorry service too busy’, you can try later or just press cancel and then press start again, and have another go. Occasionally it’ll come up with ‘Video URL cannot be…’, or ‘header error’, or ‘URL cannot be resolved’. Press cancel and start it again.
24%, 53%, 74%, 83%, 94%; once the download is complete, it will say ‘conversion finished your download should begin shortly’, and this box will come up. In explorer it should look slightly different and if it doesn’t come up at all you can just press that link there. And you want to save it to disk so press ok. And in the download area for Firefox, it will download it.
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Step 6:
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Name The Download
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Once your download is completed you might want to open it. You might want to rename it as well; you just open the downloaded folder, right click on it and rename it.
For now let’s just open the file and check it all works. And here it is playing. Divx isn’t an flv player, so that just shows that the file has downloaded. Let’s just see how bigger we can make it. And there you go. You can try coming to www.easy-vid.com and going to the menu and pressing downloadmovies/vids; and it’ll come to this page.
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Step 7:
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Other Options
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I’ve found it’s actually slightly more reliable downloading it from easy-vid.com. Put in the address; you can also again select what format you want to download it in, and hit start. And already this one has started converting. 23%, 32%, 47%; exactly the same as with the other one. Once your conversion has finished you download should begin shortly. A popup will come up, save it to disk and hit OK.
Again, the download will take this. And afterwards it’ll all run exactly the same as the other file.
