Marvin Lee Dot Net

This video download tip requires no installation of any programs, except using your internet browser only.

Some videos that are uploaded onto Facebook, are not linked directly to YouTube, and the video file is encoded, stored in Facebook’s site.

It gets a bit tricky to download and play such videos offline.

If you search with Google or any other search engines, most likely than not you will be asked to install programs. More often that not also, such programs are malwares and might install trojan horse or virus to your computer.

So, say you wanted to download a video, something like this:

Identify the URL
The URL should be in the form of http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php followed by the video id.
As an example for the above, the URL is : http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=1254357076086&ref=mf

Get the video link
View the HTML source of the page.

Right click and select ‘View Page Source’ and look for the id with “video_src”.
The following link is the hidden video link.

Convert the video link
The hidden video link is actually encoded and you need to unencode or technically, unescape the HTML code.
Go to http://www.linkedresources.com/tools/unescaper_v0.2b1.html and put the video link to the encoded textarea, then click unescape.

Voila, the actual video link will be displayed below.

Download and save the file
Now that you got the link, just paste it to your browser URL bar and download it.

Ready to play
The download file, could be in mp4 format, and if your video player such as Windows Media Player is unable to play it, and you do not have the codec, try renaming the file extension from mp4 to flv.
Proceed to play the file offline with FLV Player.

Hope it works for you, just like it worked for me! 🙂

Good To Know, Internet, Movies, Music download, Facebook, video, YouTube, YouTube Downloader App

I got an iPod nano chromatic recently and I needed to load it with videos desperately.

Apple has a great iTunes store, but you have to buy music, videos, and movies there.

Too bad in this part of the world, people tend to be more stingy than everybody else. Or is it just me? 😛

Luckily I managed to find a way to enjoy videos from YouTube with the nano.

YouTube is a wonderful library for videos, you can get movie trailers, Jacky Cheung music videos or karaoke, some official music videos, or videos of people trying to be the next American Idol.

You can easily download videos from YouTube but unfortunately, it is in FLV format. You can use FLV player or flv supported media player to play them but iPod or others cannot do that.

You will need a FLV file to MP4 converter.

I found two great ways to accomplish that.

1) Online converter

You can search for online converters which could convert FLV files to MP4. These online converters will perform the conversion at their end and then stream the output for you to download. Technically, this should be the best approach for you, as it does not require any installation of programs and it does not use any of your computer’s processing power except to just download it.

I tried vixy.net and it does the job well. Do make sure you supply a valid YouTube link and it will show you the progress of conversion and then prompt you for the download. One drawback here, is that the file name is a random name and you will need to rename it.

2) YouTube Downloader App

This is a download client program which you will need to install on your computer. The YouTube Downloader App come as an optional package with the Videora iPod Converter.

It integrates seamlessly with your iTunes and it will start iTunes after you have completed your video download.

The YouTube Downloader App has an internal internet browser in the application, and when you watch a video that is available for download, the bottom bar will have the video url highlighted in green. That indicates the video can be downloaded. Click on the Download button to add it into your download list.

You can download multiple videos simultaneously, and as contrary to the online download, this application saves the video name as your file name. It even supports UTF-8 characters. 🙂

I personally liked the YouTube Downloader App as it makes converting your YouTube video files so easy, from browsing or searching the video that you like and transparently send it to your iTunes library.

How about you? What applications do you use to load your iPod or MP4 players?

Movies, Music, Software iPod, iPod nano, iTunes, Videora iPod Converter, Vixy.net, YouTube Downloader App