Once you’ve installed the extension, a DownloadHelper icon appears in Firefox’s address bar at the top of the browser window, or in the status bar at the bottom of the browser window (we found different behavior on different Macs).
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Speaking of Firefox, its users have a better option thanks to the free DownloadHelper extension. For those files, turn to Firefox or a third-party tool.
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Unfortunately, you can’t download MPEG-4 files using this method. As mentioned earlier, you can then play this file with a third-party tool.
Option-double-click on it and it will download to your Mac as an flv file. In the list of links below look for an entry of several megabytes that appears to be loading. In this window you’ll see the name of the video followed by the word YouTube. Press Command-Option-A to produce Safari’s Activity window. For example, navigate to a YouTube video you want to capture and start it playing. If you’re using Safari you’ll find that there’s no obvious command for capturing streaming YouTube videos, but it can be done with the browser’s built-in tools provided that you’re downloading a Flash file. Easy or difficult, it’s possible to capture just about any video on the Web. While you can play these videos in a browser or with a third-party application such as the VideoLAN client (or in QuickTime Player if you’ve installed the Perian plug-in), you must convert these to a format compatible with iOS devices. However, many websites continue to offer videos encoded in the Flash (flv) format. For example, it’s fairly easy to download MPEG-4-encoded content and play those videos on your Mac and iOS devices because MPEG-4 is natively supported on these devices. And because there is, it’s not uncommon to seek ways to capture that video for later viewing on other devices or when an Internet connection isn’t available.Ĭapturing Web video can be a one- or multi-step process, depending on how the original content is encoded and protected. There’s so much, in fact, that it’s hard to watch everything you want to when you’re sitting down in front of your computer. If you’ve spent more than a couple of hours on the Web you understand that the thing is choked with videos-from YouTube to Vimeo to news and entertainment sites.