Free Computer Consultant ………. Daily Insights

Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I am a fan of video download so that you can watch online videos offline, at your own convenience (and in case the video gets pulled!).

But downloading videos usually left you with an .flv file that required a special player and sometimes just didn’t play well.

Now, video download helper, an add-on for Firefox (which hopefully you use instead of Internet Explorer whenever possible) can, with the help of a free conversion tool, automatically convert the .flv file to something more suitable, such as .avi.

You can find out more here, with the appropriate links.

The credit problems in America have been brewing for a long time. Download Maxed [NOT HERE, Google Video dropped it]. (July 2008 – this is why you want to download videos you like, never know when they will be pulled!).

I see Google is getting with it on their own video site and allowing video download to MP4 format. If that doesn’t work for you, see my blog entry on Video Download from the other day.

You can watch it on your PC if you want, but this video is almost an hour and a half long (don’t turn it off during the credits, one of the best lines comes after that – just listen to David Bowie and Freddie Mercury and wait).

We watched on the big screen TV since that’s a lot more comfortable than gathering the family around a PC.

I used Video Lan Player and selected full screen (output from my laptop). Looked very good.

Get the details and links from my video download page.

We found a site that allows you to download video from YouTube in the new format post Aug 23, 2007.

DownThisVideo.com

WARNING!

Ads on this site are not safe for work / family.

As soon as we find a better, family-safe site for video download we will post it here.

YouTube changed their video format on August 23, 2007. As a result of this “improvement”, video download programs like javamoya and keepvid no longer work.

I don’t know the details, but quite frankly I wonder why Google (YouTube) doesn’t provide video download functionality itself. If most people have the kind of broadband that doesn’t cause the video to stop and start (or just stop) then my video download page on my website wouldn’t be one of the most popular pages.

I’m not suggesting that lack of video download ability will cause viewers to abandon YouTube in favor of more worthwhile pursuits, of which most anything else is a better use of time, but since Google wants to own the world (that part they don’t already own) it surprises me that they don’t cover all the bases.

In fact, Google even launched a service to allow surfers to scan outer space in much the same way as they can now view the surface of planet earth.