From time to time I find I want to actually download a video from sites like Youtube or GoogleVideo so that I have access to them offline.
There are several ways to do this, and if you are windows user, by far the easiest is to use a Firefox plugin. There are several, but the two I like the best are unplug and videodownloader. They are both a bit fiddly, but you will find that one or the other will work for you.
Thing is, that the captured video is in FLV format – which is fine if you have a flash player, but what if you want to convert them to AVI files – or indeed any other format?
There are several freeware flv to avi programs out there, but for me the best is a program called FLV2AVI 1.0
Stupidly difficult to find on the web, it is listed in Softpedia but the link there is long since dead.
I have put a copy of this file on my server and you can download it here.
There is no installation, simply un-rar into a directory and run.
[ Tip: Make sure to switch the language from %£%^£ to English 🙂 ]
There are several output formatting options, including convert to video types such as AVI, MP4, MPG etc, as well as letting you resize the video. There is also an inbuilt FLV player.
Let us know how you get on.