Download videos from any sharing site(Youtube, Dailymotion, Metacafe, vimeo etc)

There are a lot of ways to download content from a video sharing sites. Most folks rely on applications to download videos. Applications are really unsuitable for 3 reasons

• Mostly they are specific to one or two sites
• In some cases they are shareware
• They have hardcoded techniques for url retrieval which outdate easily.

A slightly better technique for downloading is relying on sites to decode the url for you. This removes the latter 2 limitations of applications. For most of you who have come here Ripzor will suffice .  However the top limitation still remains if you are looking for a site not listed in ripzor.com. Also some times the url retrieval technique changes and sites do not update their scripts. I will give you the method to retrieve URLs in an easy manner using every day tools.

Tools required

1. Firefox
2. Firebug(or any other debugging tool)
3. [Optional] Downloader ( like flashget or Downthemall)

Dont get scared from the word debugger. This technique is mostly a misuse of the word debugging 🙂 .  Now after you have installed the above “tools” . Lets start

Step 1: Select a video downloading site like youtube.com/dailymotion.com and pick a video. For further screenshots I have picked up this youtube video and this dailymotion video. The same techniques will work on any video site.

Step2: Now open video in Firefox and enable firebug debugging tool from Tools ->Firebug-> Open Firebug in a new window

Open Firebug in Firefox

Step3: Click on the youtube tab and click on Activate Firebug for the firefox tab button in the firebug window

Activate Firebug for Firefox tab

Step 4: Select the Net tab among Console/HTML/ CSS/Script/DOM and Net on the top . Then select the Flash tab. This tab will give you all the web requests that a .swf file will make. Most sites use flash players for playing the video so this tab will work. If the following steps dont work then select the All tab for seeing all requests

Tabs to be used are net and flash

Step5. Play the video you will get a screen like this in firebug. Now look for requests that look like video requests. For ex. those ending with .flv, .mp4 or in youtube’s case get_video. Right click on that link and select Copy Location. If there is no such link then you need to go back to step3 and select All tab instead of flash.

Copy link location

Step6. Use your downloader to download that video or paste that link in firefox itself to use it for downloading the video. In some cases you will have to close the video site tab to download this video as only one streaming might be allowed.

So now you can download any video from any video sharing site as long as the video is not encrypted with the player. Let me know what all sites you tried below.