Saving Videos
Firefox Users:
Just get one of the FlashVideo add-ons for your browser. I use Fast Video Download 1.3.1.4 and it’s great for YouTube and GoogleVideo.
Everyone else:
Simple steps to saving videos to use on a SMART board.
1. Download an .flv player programme. This one does the trick:
http://www.download.com/FLV-Player/3000-2139_4-10467081.html
2. For some videos on this blog, you can click on the ‘Download Video’ option beneath the screen. It will save the video to your hard drive as a .flv file. Your brand-new .flv player will play this, as will a SMART Board with updated drivers.
3. For other videos (directly taken from YouTube or GoogleVideo), you will need to go round the houses a bit:
a. Find the video and copy the full URL
b. Open KeepV.com in a new window
c. Paste the video URL into the input box and press ‘Download Video’
d. You will end up with a file called ‘get_video’ saved on your hard disk. To make it work, rename the file as ‘videoname.flv’
e. It should now work on your computer.
Flashcatcher is another product that can be used to save Flash files. It is a bit fickle, but for some Flash animations you just hover the cursor over the top-left corner and it will give you an option to save.
Remember – many video resources are copyright, and keeping them may be counted as breach of this copyright. However, in many schools internet access is so slow or restricted, the only chance you may have to show a class a decent video is to save it this way. Just be wise about spreading these copied files around.
Posted on September 19, 2007, in GoogleVideo, Saving Video & Resources, SMART Boards, Software, YouTube. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
i-Biology 
Another player is VLC (http://www.videolan.org/vlc/) which will play pretty much anything. By default it registers all your other multimedia extensions which is annoying 😦 but has some other useful functionality…like ability to convert file types (if you know what you are doing) http://forum.videohelp.com/topic259578.html
There are online conversion services if you want an mpg or avi instead of an flv (which don’t seem to work very well for me) like:
http://vixy.net/
http://www.convertdirect.com/
Copyright is important. If you want to be legal look for stuff with a creative commons license.
Thanks, Dan. Those conversion links are useful.
Here’s a post from techcrunch.com about saving YouTube videos and converting them to MP4 for the iPod: http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/14/put-any-youtube-video-on-your-ipod/
Thanks to Weary Willy on the TES for mentioning it.
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