Watch what you download

WHO has not heard of YouTube? At some point, most of us have received a link to a YouTube video by email. And sometimes there are links to YouTube videos on different websites and forums as well.

The point being that video sharing is something that has become quite popular over the years, and as the trend becomes more popular, the websites which cater to video buffs have increased as well. Apart from YouTube, there are other sites like Yahoo! Videos, Zippy Videos and Metacafe to name a few.

But life is never this easy. If there is a hitch in these video sharing websites, it occurs when you have to watch them online. The content of these videos is streamed to the respective website which means that - barring a few websites - there is no download link at all, even if you go through the HTML of the webpage to extract one. So what do you do if you want to download a video? Or what if your connection is not good enough to allow you to watch videos online?

The solution lies in Video Downloader (http://www.videodownloader.net). It is basically a handy tool which will extract the download link of whichever video you are watching at the moment. Then click on that link to download the respective video from that website.

If you are using Firefox as your browser, then all you have to do is download a small add-on from this website and install it in your Firefox. Then, whenever you have a specific webpage opened with the streaming video, all you need to do is to click on the Video Downloader icon and a pop-up window will appear, giving you the download link.

One of the best features of this website is that it supports many video sharing websites which include You Tube and Zippy Videos. Also, if you are not interested in downloading or installing, the website has the facility by which you can simply copy and paste the link of the page which has the video you want to watch, and click download. The website will handle the rest of the work for you.

Trouble is, sometimes, the downloader does bungle up the links a little bit. Resultantly, instead of the download link, you end up getting something completely different. Nevertheless, if it you are lucky, you will get the right link. And if things are not working at all, you can always get in touch with the developer of this tool, who has left his email address on the website.

Another little problem which we used to face when using Video Downloader is that the download link had the extension of .flv instead of .wmv. This means that even if we did manage to download the entire video, we could not play it in your standard Windows Media Player or Real Player. This problem has also been solved. There is a link on the website to download the FLV Player so that even if you are getting links with a .flv extension, all you need to do is download that very player to watch your videos.

At the end of the day though, if your connection is working fine, you can have a collection of all your favourite videos. Then it is up to you whether to store them on the PC/Laptop or burn them on CD/DVD. All thanks to the Video Downloader.

To watch the videos of your choice, log onto http://www.videodownloader.net.