Written by Liz Gannes
Posted Thursday, May 15, 2008 at 4:00 AM PT

 

The Best Web Video Download Tools

Streaming web video is great and all, but every once in a while you find something that you just want to save and cherish for always. If your home Internet connection is as unreliable as mine you’ll understand what I mean. There are a bunch of web sites and little apps to help you save hard copies of web videos, but perhaps due to their teetering on the edge of violating video hosts’ TOS, they are less than user-friendly. So yesterday I decided to go through them all and figure out which ones are the best.

To start with, I tried to eliminate services that spew out overwhelming ads or restrict themselves to YouTube. After that, the tools fells into one of four categories: URL-entry sites, Firefox extensions, userscripts and software downloads. Among them, the trade-off seems to be convenience vs. power.

URL-entry sites: KeepVid is perhaps the best known of this bunch. When you find a video you want to save, you copy the URL and paste it into KeepVid, which returns to you a link for downloading FLV or MP4 versions. To actually get them to your desktop, you have to right-click save and rename the file extensions. KeepVid also offers a drag-to-install toolbar button — convenient, but it still doesn’t save you the renaming hassle. Another option, ClipNabber, supports an even wider variety of video hosts. I also saw recommendations for VideoDownloader, but it seems to be error-prone.

Firefox extensions: These are much more powerful, especially for sites where the unique URL for each video isn’t obvious. I liked Video DownloadHelper, which gives you a small icon that rides along in your toolbar and wakes up every time you navigate to a page that has video. It also allows you to download multiple videos at once. Here’s a page with tons of user-submitted tutorial videos about how it works. Sothink Media makes a Firefox extension too, and comes with its own FLV player.

Greasemonkey and other userscripts: If you don’t want to deal with a bookmarklet you can do a little more work to get a download button to appear right on video pages. Download Video is a script that works for a variety of video sites. However, it doesn’t currently seem to be working on YouTube, and neither does this YouTube-specific script. For now these probably aren’t a good bet because they’re too glitchy.

Software: If you’re really serious about this (which I’m not) you might want to leave the browser and install a separate application for the specific task of downloading Internet videos. Sothink Media makes one of these for Windows but you only get 30 days free before you have to pay $30. It also captures any video you come across, which in this day and age of video banner ads, is overkill.

DVDVideoSoft’s app is full-service, but it only works for YouTube and on Windows. Get Tube is a Mac alternative, but it also works only for YouTube. RealPlayer’s solution is a bit of a hybrid; the new version of its player slaps a button on videos around the web à la the Greasemonkey options, but then whatever you download is locked into the whole RealPlayer system. Vixy also looked promising but I couldn’t get it to work.

So now that I’ve completely overwhelmed my test computer with doodads and plugins, I would say my favorite of the day was the Firefox extension Video DownloadHelper. Tiny, quiet and powerful works for me.

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Topic: Software

Comments (13)

  • One of the best one’s I’ve used is called Videobox from http://tastyapps.com – works like a charm and has one of the easiest interfaces. No brainer!

    Mark Schoneveld — 6:58 AM on May 15, 2008 Reply

  • Flash Video Resources is the best one I’ve used. It worked on MySpace TV when none of the others worked. And no adds or popups. The link is below. Also, Real Player is useful when downloading embedded videos that are proprietary as opposed to viral videos. The only thing it doesn’t work on is DRM protected videos.

    http://max.subfighter.com/flv/downloader.php

    Frank Pozen — 8:52 AM on May 15, 2008 Reply

  • Great post Liz! I’ve had a heck of a time finding one of these that work well.

    Consider this Stumbled! :-)

    John / SocialNext — 10:56 AM on May 16, 2008 Reply

  • Real player makes this exceedingly simple. You just click on the tab, and it puts the video in a folder of your choosing. The videos are freely available from the folder, and are not necessarily locked into the real player software.

    Bob Boynton — 2:53 PM on May 16, 2008 Reply

    • I tried to download Real Player into my computer (windows XP)amd it did not download. Is there something I’m doing wrong?

      Ruben — 8:25 AM on October 14, 2009 Reply

  • There is and other new Firefox addon to download videos and music from almost any site:
    http://netvideohunter.com

    spyder — 4:16 PM on June 3, 2008 Reply

  • Have you test Vdownloader? it work fine also. another tool like plugin is from real media player.

    Baas — 1:28 AM on June 4, 2008 Reply

  • E.M. Youtube video download tool works great for me.
    Download any video from youtube or any video websites automatically, when u play the video.

    It can also convert , burn, search, burn, repair and play any youtube video.
    http://www.effectmatrix.com/Youtube_video_download_tool/index.htm

    malinna — 7:02 AM on June 10, 2008 Reply

  • Video Download Studio™ is a powerful video downloader and converter tool which can help you download videos and free music from popular online social websites like YouTube, Metacafe, imeem, Break.com, Dailymotion, Veoh, Yahoo video, Google video, MySpace, Vimeo, RuTube, Blip.tv etc.

    It also helps you convert online videos to all kinds of video and audio format like AVI, WMV, MPEG4, MP3, WMA which can be import to Windows Movie Maker or other mobile devise such as iPod, iPhone, PSP MP3 Player etc.

    The built-in Media Player and Video Converter will focus on strengthening the ability of controlling complicated video and movie formats.

    http://www.downloadvideos-convert.com/

    aaron leo — 7:07 PM on October 29, 2008 Reply

  • for me, VideoGet is the best downloader ever. It can download from any websites and convert it right away.

    kriza — 1:02 AM on May 13, 2009 Reply

  • replay media catcher best video download program, works with yahoo video, last.fm, myspace and all video pages, rmtp stream protocol support

    maynak00 — 6:22 AM on June 21, 2009 Reply

  • SOTHINK…TOO MANY PROBLEMS WITH DOWMLOADING VIDEOS, YOU GET TECH SUPPORT FROM ANOTHER COUNRTY…I WASTE $60.00 PURCHASING SO THINK. I JUST DELETED THE PROGRAMS OUT OF MY COMPUTER.

    Ruben — 8:08 PM on October 13, 2009 Reply

  • Many thanks for giving out that remarkable information. One sure can learn a lot from it. Using Chandler “Running-To-Do-Lists” I am more organized in fulfilling my daily errands and all the tasks my job requires to be taken care of. Thus my day does not feel so stressful and packed. My job requires that I send many emails and I receive hundreds on a daily basis. And to stay organized with my emails I use Email Sorter Wizard, a MS Outlook add-in that helps me to stay organized with my inbox too. One can define rules fast and with ease to make Email Sorter Wizard sort and file incoming and outgoing emails. Interesting article and I’m sure people will profit from it.

    Driscoll — 10:47 AM on November 9, 2009 Reply

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