I have read this thread but please hear me out.
I use Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (32-bit) and I didn't bother to install the Flash plugin for Firefox as I am using a netbook and sometimes Flash caused firefox to crash. What I would like to ask is if I had the link to the video, is there some way I can download it and watch it offline (via VLC) so that I don't need to install Flash plugin? Command line or GUI techniques is welcome.
Based on what I have read, using the /tmp technique requires Flash plugin to be installed and the video to be loaded before I can go scavenge it in the said directory. Note that I also want to dload videos from site aside from youtube.
I would recommend ClipGrab, it downloads videos from many popular video sites including:
It also allows you to transcode the video into multiple formats including audio formats such as mp3 and ogg vorbis.
You can install it from the ppa:clipgrab-team/ppa PPA.
CClive is a command line application that downloads videos from a number of sites including youtube and dailymotion. If you run:
cclive will download the videos to the current working directory.
See man cclive for details of more advanced options.
Abby is a GUI frontend for cclive. It seems from the google code page that the development is inactive and I can't get it to work in Maverick. I remember using it in Lucid and it worked OK.
I recall having problems with cclive and abby when I was using it on Lucid for downloading youtube videos. This is because youtube changed their implementation (probably to stop downloaders like cclive) and the version of cclive in the repositories wasn't up to date enough to work. There were similar problems with youtube-dl. A solution to this is to install a newer version from source or find a ppa of the newer version.
The commandline tool
youtube-dlcan download videos from YouTube, dailymotion and some other sites.There is also a Totem plugin to look at Youtube videos.
One of the better tools is the Firefox Add-On 1-Click YouTube Video Download. It gives you an easy right-clickable download link.
By far the best way to download flash videos from the internet is using the get_flash_videos tool from here http://code.google.com/p/get-flash-videos/ . From the description on the page:
I would definitely recommend using this program.
CLI alternatives for downloading from YouTube or other flash video streaming sites:
Package: get-flash-videos
Syntax:
with specified URL of the video.
where SEARCH is the video-name/string to search for in Google Videos.
Supported sites:
Supports many video sites including
Package: youtube-dl
Syntax:
Some of currently supported sites:
Mozilla Firefox add-on:
Update: Merging my other answer for this post.
This one's been my favorite Firefox addon: Flash Video Downloader
Currently supported sites:
Also allows for flash games download from:
You can use "Easy Youtube Video Downloader" extension in Firefox:
Easy YouTube Video Downloader Add-on
I'm a big fan of jdownloader. It has plugins for most of the common video sites. You can choose at what definition you download from (on youtube at least, i'm not sure about other sites). It automatically runs url you copy for downloading, its a nice streamlined process. I suggest you try it out https://launchpad.net/~jd-team/+archive/jdownloader. Add the PPA from here and install "jdownloader" (by the way, its written in java, its only downfall)
I would recommend this extension for Chrome http://grabanymedia.altervista.org/ translated into English, Italian, French, German, Portuguese
If you only like to watch the youtube videos, you can with vlc. Only thing you need to copy the youtube URL and paste to the VLC main window and hit Play (enter). You also can drag and drop the URL from the browser to the vlc main window with mouse or touchpad. It even easier.