How to download videos from almost any site - Part 1

I don’t like to watch videos online because they do not play smoothly and sometime I have to wait until it buffers. On top of that my ISP sucks. Here I have some methods I used to download videos and play them offline.
 

Information here should not be used for illegal and unethical purposes and must obey any copyrights mentioned by the owner(s) or the publisher(s). Use this article solely to view videos offline and check terms and conditions mentioned by the owner(s) or the publisher(s). You should not redistribute the videos downloaded, using this techniques, for any purpose without the permission of the publisher(s).

I recommend that you read my “How to download videos from Google” article before you read this. Now I’m going to tell you how to download videos from almost any video from either a video hosting sites like Youtube as well as many other sources. I admit that with some video sites, the simple methods without much software do not work

The basic tools you need are, Mozilla Firefox (IE just sucks, just don’t use it), Free Download Manager (a free download manager, you can use anything that supports Firefox), few add-ons to Firefox and K-lite codec pack (you need codecs to play the videos offline. K-lite codec pack provides a good bundle of codecs)

Just install them before you begin and Download the following Firefox extensions.

• UnPlug and VideoDownloader or Fast Video Download

Now you are ready to download videos

Using the Fast Video Download extension you can download videos from following video servers

Angry Alien, Anime Episodes, Anime Forever, Bad Jojo, Blip.TV, Bo-Funk, Bolt, Break.com, Bubblare.dk, CollegeHumor.com, Current.TV, Daily Motion, Danerd.com, eVideo Share, Google Video, Grinvi, iFilm, Libero.IT Video, HI5 (VideoEgg), My Space, MetaCafe, News.NTV.ru, Put File, Streetfire, Totally Crap, You Tube, V-Social and Vidiac.

All you have to do is visit the webpage that has the video and click on the Fast Video Download icon. Then you’ll get a window to save the file as an .FLV.

In the VideoDownloader extension page they says “Download videos from Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion,... and other 60+ video sites ! And all embedded objects on a webpage (movies, mp3s, flash, quicktime, etc) ! Directly!”

However then you click on the VideoDwonloader button (right next to the blue color completion indication bar of Firefox), a popup window will appear. And there will be a direct link to the video. You can either sight click on it and then click on “Save Link As…” and save it anywhere you want. Or if you have a download manager installed, you can drop that link to the download manager.

Now major video hosting sites are covered. Here after we have to use our brain and the experience little bit. Let me give you some information regarding streaming and commonly used techniques to play video on web pages.

Many uses flash these days. Most of the time only the player or the controller loads and appear on the browser and then the player request the video on the server. If we look at the source code we only see player has embedded in the page. If you download the player’s .swf file embedded, it’s less than 100KBs most of the time and has no use to us.

But like many other solutions this has some weaknesses. And we are now going to exploit them.

First types of videos are those recorded with Camtasia Studio (screen captures). This is so popular and you’ll find many videos done by Camtasia. Again, there is no one way that fits all. When you export videos with Camtasia, it creates set of files. One is the actual .swf file for the screen capture. Lets say name of that is “d_video.swf”. It creates another SWF file called “d_video_controller.swf”, that’s the player and it has those play, pause and other buttons. The “d_video_controller.swf” file is the one you see embedded into the HTML page. No, you don’t have to dig the source code, that’s why we installed the UnPlug extension.

All you have to do is, just visit to the page that has the video embedded and click on the Unplug button. And it will give you a list of objects that has been embedded to the page. Right click on the “d_video_controller.swf”. Then paste it somewhere and remove “_controller” from the URL. If the URL is http:// example.com/vid /d_video_control.swf, after removing the “_control” it will be like http:// example.com/vid /d_video.swf. then copy it again to the clipboard (just select the text and press CTRL+V or right-click -> copy).

Then you need to start FreeDownloadManager and right click on the tray icon and enable “Clipboard Monitoring” Then FDM will monitor your clipboard for any URLS and since you have copied one now, it’ll prompt you to download the file. Give a location and click OK. Then it’ll make few parallel connections to the web server and download your file in few minutes (or seconds may be). That’s easy.

If there more than one video, Camtasia creates a single player file for all and you can’t use the previous method. But they have been kind enough (:D) to give us some information about the video. See the screen shot below.

The video information says “movies/overview.swf” that mean if the html page is http:// example .com/vid/screemCap.html, the URL of the video is http:// example .com/ vid/movies/overview.swf. All you have to is copy the URL to the clipboard, FDM will do the rest.

In another type,  information about the video is passed to the player .SWF file as an XML file. Again you can get is quite easily with Unplug. Here is an example url that unplug returnes. http:// www. example.com/vid/mvtitel_controller.swf? csConfigFile=mvtitle_config.xml. First try this method. As we did earlier, remove (copy the link to a text editor like notepad. While you are copying the URL FDM may prompt you to download it, cancel it now) the “_controler” part and all the things after “.swf” (don’t remove the “.swf” part). Then copy the like back to clipboard. This time FDM will pop-up a window to download the new file, Select a destination and Click OK.

If that didn’t work you have to move to the second method. Get the previous URL with Unplug. This time remove the “mvtitel_controller.swf?csConfigFile=” part. Your URL may have a different name then “mvtitle” and your new ULD should look like “http:// www. example.com/vid/ mvtitle_config.xml”. Copy (note that FDM may throw that download window again, just click on cancel for the moment) and paste this URL on FireFox and it will display the XML file to you.

You will get an XML file like above. Copy the information between “<MovieURL>” tags. And replace construct the new URL with that. For an example, new URL is “http:// www. example.com/vid/mvtitle.swf”, where “mvtitle.swf” is the name we discovered in between “<MovieURL>” tags and “http:// www. example.com/vid/” is the location of the player.

These are the default settings in Camtasia Studio, but you will come across some website with different settings than this. What you have to do is, just think a bit and analyze the source code and guess how the website has implemented it.

Now you know how to download almost anything created with Camtasia Studio. In part 2 of this article I’ll demonstrate some other techniques to download more videos.

Dharshin