Finding, viewing, downloading, and saving videos from the web

Anybody got good tips for this, particularly good sources (as well as Youtube) of free videos on all subjects, not just news, movies and technical subjects. OS independent options for downloading and saving sought - the best downloaders and browser extensions. I have used Firefox extension Video DownloadHelper and William put me on to youtube-dl, but there are lots of others, some possibly better and/or with special uses. This is the topic for the Hamilton Computer Club meeting tomorrow, so any Windows-friendly options welcome, or you could join us to 60A Sare Crescent and show us yourself. Roderick Aldridge

On Wed, 10 Aug 2016 18:38:02 +1200, Roderick Aldridge wrote:
Anybody got good tips for this, particularly good sources (as well as Youtube) of free videos on all subjects, not just news, movies and technical subjects.
The most powerful and versatile downloader I know of is youtube-dl <https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl>. It covers a huge range of sites, and is updated very quickly when something changes on a site. It’s written in Python. Every time I try to download something and hit an error, usually I just need to do a git-fetch and it’s working again. :) Probably it can be kept so up-to-date because it’s a command-line tool, not a GUI tool. It has options for batch downloads and format choices (it defaults to the highest-quality format available on the site). It can download entire playlists and has other smarts for parsing pages. For example, I just pointed it to this page <http://interactive.aljazeera.com/aje/2016/the-caliph-islamic-history/index.html> and it downloaded all three parts of the doco.

The most powerful and versatile downloader I know of is youtube-dl <https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl>. It covers a huge range of sites, and is updated very quickly when something changes on a site. It’s written in Python. Every time I try to download something and hit an error, usually I just need to do a git-fetch and it’s working again. :)
+1 for youtube-dl When using Firefox, I quite often use the video download-helper addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/ Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/

Thanks. Confirms my best findings. Rod On 10 August 2016 at 20:17, Peter Reutemann <fracpete(a)waikato.ac.nz> wrote:
The most powerful and versatile downloader I know of is youtube-dl <https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl>. It covers a huge range of sites, and is updated very quickly when something changes on a site. It’s written in Python. Every time I try to download something and hit an error, usually I just need to do a git-fetch and it’s working again. :)
+1 for youtube-dl
When using Firefox, I quite often use the video download-helper addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/video-downloadhelper/
Cheers, Peter -- Peter Reutemann Dept. of Computer Science University of Waikato, NZ +64 (7) 858-5174 http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/ http://www.data-mining.co.nz/ _______________________________________________ wlug mailing list | wlug(a)list.waikato.ac.nz Unsubscribe: https://list.waikato.ac.nz/mailman/listinfo/wlug
participants (3)
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Lawrence D'Oliveiro
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Peter Reutemann
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Roderick Aldridge