Jan 10
Two websites that do this for you:
http://www.clipconverter.cc (do not use this site – it works but it has some ads that are a scam)
It used to be that to download a flash video on your mac you needed to get a video downloader for safari, but now the best way seems to be to go a webpage that will do the hard work for you. It will convert the movie from a flash file to a normal (.mov) file and create a link and then you can download the file directly from safari. Here’s how to do it:
1. Go to the site that has the video that you want to download (e.g. http://videowebsite.com/). Then go to the page with your movie.
2. Copy the URL of the page the movie you want is on. (It will be something weird, probably like this: http://website.com/video389fhw4r0) To copy the address, click in the safari address bar, double click the address to select it, then press Apple-C to copy it.
3. Go to one of the websites above and, in the little box, paste (Apple-V) the URL.
4. Press ‘Download, and a number of formats will appear. Generally the best is the biggest format.
5. Select the format you want and press ‘download’.
6. It will download into your safari downloads folder.
Have you tried http://www.zamzar.com ?
This is a great service for getting YouTube video and have it converted into various formats.
I use cosmopod. It adds a button to the Safari toolbar. When you are playing a movie you can click the button to download the movie, convert to mp4 and add to itunes. http://www.cocoamug.com/cosmopod/
Its not free. But I don’t think Videobox is free either, is it? I think they are about the same price.
But I thought Videobox also had a function that automatically detected when a movie was playing and could start downloading it for you. I think it worked for me a few times but not consistently.
iCab is my normal browser. When I play a YouTube video the iCab filters automatically bring up a link at the top of the page to download the movie file. But it only works in YouTube.
I checked it out because I wanted to capture the world news and show it to students at our college.
Thanks for the info wayne. Following your advice I’ve tried the trial versions of both Videobox & Cosmopod. Videobox had some issues. It took quite a few attempts to accept the URL address of the video plus when it finally did the resulting video was fairly poor quality (both of these issues may of course have been the result of me doing something wrong). Cosmopod on the other hand worked very smoothly and produced a much better quality video. For what its worth my votes with Cosmopod. The button in the Safari toolbar is also VERY convenient.
[…] In this post I wrote about Videobox and how it useful to watch flash files. It is available for free from here as a special Christmas deal. […]
At step 2, once you identify the downloading video file in the Activity Window if you Option click the FLV will just start downloading without any additional addons. USe it on a daily basis to grab video – from there open the FLV in Quicktime and then save it as a Movie File – too easy and no cost.
Cheers
Cosmopod doesn’t work with Safari 5.1:
https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3191201?start=15&tstart=0
KeepVid is now 505 inactive and ClipConverter tried to install ransomware.
Keepvid is definitely working.
Yes the ads on clipconverter look suspicious – thanks.
Allavsoft can download Twitter video its original video format or directly download video from Twitter to MP4, MOV, AVI, WMV, FLV, MPG, MP3 etc.
Keepvid.com maybe the easiest way to download YouTube videos, But to download YouTube videos with this site, it will ask you to “download Java” to your Mac. In comparison of these youtube downloading sites or free apps, I would choose Acethinker video downloader, it’s a free web-based application, you don’t have to download or install anything.